I put a fresh Home Assistant on a small Hetzner VM this month, and the first thing I wanted to change was how it looked. The default is fine. It is also what every screenshot on the internet looks like.
So I installed the six most-starred themes that are still maintained, and photographed all of them on the same dashboard. What follows is what that turned up, including two things that cost me an afternoon.
Six repositories give you 74 themes
This is the number no guide mentions. I installed six theme repositories. The theme picker in my profile then offered 74 entries.
The reason is that most repos ship families rather than a single theme. iOS Themes is one file with 28 entries — seven colours, each in light and dark, each in a standard and an alternative variant. HA LCARS adds 27. Catppuccin has 7 flavours, Frosted Glass 6 variants across 6 files, Graphite 5, and Material You exactly 1.
If you want to compare themes, decide on one variant per family before you start and say which one. Otherwise you are either looking at 74 screenshots or, worse, comparing a light variant of one against a dark variant of another without noticing.
Two ways to install, and why I used both
The manual way is to download the YAML from the repo into config/themes/, restart, and pick the theme in your user profile. No account, no extra component, works immediately. That is what HACS does in the background anyway.
I did it manually first for a practical reason: the HACS setup needs a GitHub device-code login in a browser and cannot be scripted. Setting up HACS has two stages. Four acknowledgement checkboxes — all of them mandatory, and the dialog appears in English even on a German interface, because HACS only ships an en.json — and then the device code on github.com.
One of those checkboxes is worth reading. It states that there are no add-ons in HACS. Running Home Assistant in a container means no Supervisor and no add-ons, and HACS does not change that. It gives you integrations, cards and themes.
HACS 2.x removed the category tabs
Every older German-language guide I found is wrong on this point. There used to be tabs for Integrations, Frontend and Themes. HACS 2.0.5 shows a single table with a search box, grouping and sorting controls, and a filter where you select the type: Integration, Dashboard, Template, Theme.
There is no Themes category to open any more. You filter for it. The panel also has an Activity column, which is how I decided what to install: Metrology has 687 stars and last saw activity two years ago, iOS Dark Mode has 488 stars and four years. Both are out of this comparison for that reason.
The HACS panel filtered to themes. The Activity column on the right is why Metrology and iOS Dark Mode are not in this comparison.
What the comparison actually shows
HA LCARS renders correctly and does not look like LCARS. card-mod is installed, the theme applies, and what you get is a purple-grey theme with a salmon header bar. The Star Trek panel look comes from cards built for it, not from the theme. If you install it and keep your existing dashboard, that is what you will see. This is the most useful thing I learned all week and it is not written down anywhere I could find.
LCARS also ships three entries that are not themes at all. Its YAML has top-level keys used as anchors by the real themes, named things like (DO NOT USE/MODIFY)=== LCARS variables. Home Assistant does not know the difference and lists them as selectable. Pick one and you get a half-rendered dashboard.
Three of the six depend on card-mod, which is a custom card rather than a theme and has to be installed separately. I counted the references: LCARS has 71, Frosted Glass between 5 and 11 per file, Graphite one per file. Without card-mod those themes look different from the screenshots in their own repositories. Catppuccin, iOS Themes and Material You need nothing extra.
Frosted Glass is by far the heaviest file at 2.0 MB against 0.25 MB for Catppuccin. The glass effect is real blur, which compresses badly and asks more of the browser. Catppuccin, Graphite and Material You gave the cleanest result with no extra work at all.
Frosted Glass, dark mode. The blur is real, which is why it is the heaviest file of the six.
iOS Themes, dark mode. One file, 28 selectable entries; this is one of them.
HA LCARS, dark mode, with card-mod installed. It renders, and it does not look like LCARS.
Catppuccin, Mocha flavour. Nothing else needs installing.
Material You, dark mode. One file, one theme, the cleanest install of the six.
Graphite, dark mode. This is the one I kept.
The interface in these screenshots is German — that is the language the instance runs in. The themes look the same either way.
How the screenshots were made, and the mistake in the first round
The whole point of a theme comparison is that the frame is identical, so I automated it: Playwright, a fixed 1680×1050 viewport at scale factor 2, giving 3360×2100 actual pixels, sidebar collapsed, same dashboard every time.
My first run used full-page capture and produced five different image heights, between 2354 and 2386 pixels, because themes change padding and line height and the page therefore ends up taller or shorter. That breaks the one condition the comparison rests on. The second run used a fixed viewport instead, and all 18 images came out the same size. Anyone comparing themes by hand will not notice this, and their comparison is wrong anyway.
The other thing I had to redo: I shot the first series at 12:20 in the afternoon, when the demo solar curve sits flat near its maximum. The images were useless as illustrations. The series in this post was taken in the evening, with a full day of data behind it.
What I would pick
For a dashboard I actually want to look at, Graphite. It is quiet, it has a proper dark mode, it needs nothing installed alongside it, and it does not fight the built-in cards. Catppuccin if you want more colour, Material You if you want the least possible fuss — it was the cleanest install of the six, one file and one theme.
Frosted Glass is the one people will want from the screenshots, and it is the one that costs the most: card-mod, the heaviest file, and a look that depends on what is behind the panels. LCARS is a project, not a theme choice.
The full ranking these six came from, with star counts and last activity, is in the HACS themes directory. If HACS itself is new to you, start with the installation guide.
