Once HACS is installed, the real question is what to put in it. (New to HACS? Start with What is HACS? and how to install HACS.) Here are the HACS integrations I actually run in my own Home Assistant setup – followed by the community must-haves worth knowing.
My own HACS panel — the "Downloaded" group is the honest version of this article: five things, not fifty.
That screenshot is the whole argument for this list. After several years of running Home Assistant I have five things installed through HACS, and every one of them earns its place by doing something the built-in integrations can't. The temptation with HACS is to treat it like an app store and collect; what you get from that is a setup that breaks a little more with every Home Assistant release.
The HACS integrations I actually use
Huawei Solar
This is how I read my Huawei SUN2000 inverter over Modbus: power, daily yield, battery state and grid import/export all land as native Home Assistant sensors – no vendor cloud in the loop. If you run a Huawei inverter, it's the single most useful integration on this list. I wrote up the Modbus side in detail in caching a Huawei SUN2000 over Modbus.
One caveat that isn't obvious until you hit it: the inverter's Modbus interface tolerates very few concurrent clients. Point the integration, a second tool and a dashboard at it simultaneously and it starts refusing connections. I ended up putting a caching proxy in front of it so everything reads through one connection — that story, including the reconnect handling, is in caching a Huawei SUN2000 over Modbus and the register map I actually use. If you're on a Huawei system, read those before you start adding clients.
Tapo: Cameras Control
Brings TP-Link Tapo cameras into Home Assistant as proper entities – stream, motion detection, privacy mode and more – without depending on the Tapo cloud. If you've got Tapo gear, this turns it into first-class HA devices.
The reason I use it rather than the generic camera route is that it exposes the things the vendor app keeps to itself — privacy mode, motion detection toggles, presets — as normal entities you can automate against. The trade-off is that it tracks TP-Link's firmware: an occasional update changes what the camera exposes, and the integration needs to catch up. That's the general HACS bargain in one example.
ShellyForHass
The community Shelly integration. Worth being honest here: Home Assistant now ships a core Shelly integration too, so for a fresh setup you can often use that instead. I still run ShellyForHass, but check which one fits before adding it.
To be concrete about the choice: if you're starting today, use the core Shelly integration. It's maintained by the Home Assistant project, it covers the current generation of devices, and it's one less thing to update by hand. I run ShellyForHass because my setup predates that and it works — "it works and I have no reason to touch it" is a legitimate answer, but it's not a recommendation.
button-card
My go-to custom Lovelace card. button-card gives you fully templatable buttons and tiles – custom states, icons, colours and tap actions – which is what most "how did they build that dashboard?" screenshots are really made of.
What makes it worth the dependency is templating. A button-card can change its icon, colour and text based on any state or attribute, so one card definition covers a device that has five meaningful states instead of five stacked cards. That's also its downside: it's a small templating language of its own, and a dashboard built entirely out of it becomes something only you can maintain. I use it for the handful of tiles that genuinely need logic and leave the rest as standard cards.
Other popular HACS must-haves worth knowing
These are community favourites I'd recommend looking at, even where they aren't in my own stack:
Mushroom
A set of clean, minimal dashboard cards – the fastest way to a modern-looking Lovelace UI without hand-writing CSS.
Card Mod
Apply custom CSS to almost any card. The standard tool once you want your dashboard to look exactly your way.
mini-graph-card
Compact, good-looking history graphs for any sensor – ideal for energy, temperature and humidity at a glance.
auto-entities
Populate cards automatically by filter (area, domain, attribute) instead of maintaining entity lists by hand. A huge time-saver as your setup grows.
Frigate
Local AI object detection for cameras/NVR. If you outgrow basic camera control and want person/car detection that runs on your own hardware, this is the one.
How I decide whether something is worth installing
Because HACS installs unreviewed third-party code straight into Home Assistant (I go into why that matters in the install guide), I check four things before an integration earns a place in my setup:
Is it still alive? Recent commits matter far more than star count. A popular project abandoned two years ago will break on a future Home Assistant release.
Do issues get answered? An issue tracker full of unanswered reports is what maintenance looks like right before it stops.
Does it replace something built in? If a core integration covers it — as with Shelly — take the core one. Fewer moving parts.
Would I notice if it disappeared? If the honest answer is no, I don't install it. Every integration is something to update, debug and eventually migrate.
What I deliberately don't use HACS for
Worth saying because most lists never do: the load-bearing parts of my setup don't come from HACS at all. Modbus, KNX and the REST sensors are configured against the built-in integrations in YAML, because those are maintained as part of Home Assistant and I want the parts that run my house to keep working across upgrades without my involvement.
HACS earns its place at the edges — a vendor whose hardware Home Assistant doesn't cover natively, or a dashboard card that doesn't exist in core. That's a genuinely useful role, and it's a smaller one than "best HACS integrations" lists usually imply.
Frequently asked questions
Are HACS integrations free?
Almost all are free and open source. The integration itself stays free even when the underlying device or service has a paid tier.
How many HACS integrations should I install?
Only the ones you'll actually use – each adds maintenance and update overhead. A handful of well-chosen integrations beats dozens of half-used ones.
Do HACS integrations update automatically?
No. HACS notifies you when an update is available; you apply it with a click and a restart. Updates aren't silent by default.
Do HACS integrations survive a Home Assistant update?
Usually, but not guaranteed — that's the actual risk of custom integrations. When Home Assistant makes a breaking change, a well-maintained integration ships a fix within days and an abandoned one simply stops loading, which shows up in the logs at startup. It's the main reason I check whether a project is still active before installing it.
Can a HACS integration break my whole Home Assistant?
It can stop Home Assistant from starting cleanly, yes — a custom integration that throws during setup will show up as a failed component. It won't usually take the whole instance down, but it's a good argument for keeping backups and for not installing five new things at once, so you know which one caused it.
Next step
Not sure what HACS even is yet? Read What is HACS? – or if you haven't set it up, follow how to install HACS in Home Assistant.
The list above is what I actually run. If you want the whole field rather than my shortlist, the HACS integrations directory tracks everything installable through HACS, ranked by GitHub stars, with collections for energy, climate, lighting, media and security.
