Home Assistant turns HACS into a Marketplace: here’s everything that’s going to change

If you’ve been using Home Assistant for a while, HACS is probably already installed. The Home Assistant Community Store is the go-to place for adding a community integration, a dashboard card, or a theme that Home Assistant doesn’t offer out of the box.

With Home Assistant 2026.11, HACS is becoming part of the Core under a new name: Marketplace. There’s no need to install it separately anymore. You might think it’s just a name change, but above all, it’s a change in status for everything the community creates.

HACS, the tool everyone installs… even though it was never official

HACS is so widespread that you could easily think it’s always been part of Home Assistant. It hasn’t. It’s a custom integration developed separately, giving you access to community projects: integrations that aren’t part of the Core, dashboard cards, themes, and various tools.

Without it, you have to find the files on GitHub, copy them to the right place, and then keep an eye out for new versions yourself. HACS takes care of all that for you.

I’ve always found this paradox amusing: the tool designed to avoid manual installations had to be installed manually itself. With 2026.11, that’s over.

HACS becomes Marketplace

The Home Assistant team is integrating HACS directly into the Core, with a more descriptive name for newcomers: Marketplace. It’s a Core integration, enabled by default, with its own interface under Settings > Marketplace.

The developers have taken a pragmatic approach: integrate HACS while changing as little as possible. They haven’t rewritten a store from scratch. Marketplace builds on HACS’s foundations, its catalog, and most of the way it works.

If you know HACS, you won’t be lost, despite the new name.

What will you be able to install?

First, you’ll find custom integrations, probably the most common use of HACS. They add support for a device or service that doesn’t yet have an official integration. Next come plugins and dashboard cards, themes, and custom templates.

In practice, nothing changes: you search for an extension, read its description, install it, and then receive its updates.

The new feature I like most: each installed repository has its own update entity. New versions will therefore appear under Settings > Updates, alongside Home Assistant updates. Community extensions can finally be managed like the rest of the system.

No more need for a GitHub account to browse the catalog

You’ll no longer need to connect a GitHub account to browse and install items listed in the official catalog. The catalog is still HACS’s, but listed versions are downloaded directly from their archives or release files, without going through the GitHub API.

A GitHub account is still required in some cases, particularly for custom repositories that aren’t in the catalog. You’ll also still be able to add a repository manually using its link. The flexibility that made HACS so popular remains, and those who stick to the catalog have one less step to take.

I already have HACS. What happens now?

That’s the question everyone will be asking. Normally, there’s nothing to reinstall.

When Home Assistant 2026.11 starts up for the first time, Marketplace takes over your existing HACS installation: installed repositories, custom repositories, dashboard resources, and update entities. The old HACS integration and its files are then removed.

Compatibility with the old setup has also been taken into account. Links to /hacs redirect to Marketplace, and dashboard files remain accessible via the old /hacsfiles/ path.

That should keep the November update from turning into a weekend of troubleshooting.

Sometimes, no restart needed

This change is more technical, but very useful. Home Assistant can now refresh its custom integrations cache after an installation. If the integration has a compatible configuration flow and wasn’t already loaded, it’s available right away, without a full restart.

When a restart is still necessary, Home Assistant lets you know through Repairs.

Individually, these are small details. Together, they make community extensions much more pleasant to use.

Heads up: Marketplace doesn’t mean “official”

In my opinion, this is the most important point. Marketplace is official, but its contents aren’t. The extensions it distributes are still code written and maintained by the community.

Home Assistant displays a warning the first time you use it, and an administrator must accept the risks before they can install or update anything. That makes sense: a custom integration runs directly in Home Assistant, and a custom card runs code in every user’s browser. So it’s best not to install the first GitHub repository you come across.

There are some safeguards, though. Downloaded files are checked, installations and removals can only affect designated directories, and several checks take place before an installation is approved. If a custom integration replaces a built-in integration, you also have to confirm it explicitly.

However, for now there’s no cryptographic signature or checksum to verify the distributed code. Marketplace makes installation easier, but it doesn’t audit every project.

An emergency stop button for dangerous extensions

The catalog distinguishes between two cases. A repository that’s simply removed (abandoned, archived, etc.) continues to work for those who installed it. The user is notified and no longer receives updates.

A repository marked as critical—that is, deemed dangerous—is treated much more severely: Marketplace can uninstall it and restart Home Assistant.

The catalog is checked at startup and then every six hours. When software controls locks, an alarm, heating, or part of the electrical system, being able to respond that quickly is no luxury.

What HACS did that Marketplace won’t

HACS also managed AppDaemon apps and Python scripts. Marketplace doesn’t support them.

If you use any, nothing will be deleted: the files will remain in place. Their updates simply won’t be tracked anymore, and Home Assistant will let you know through Repairs.

For most people, who use HACS for integrations and Lovelace cards, nothing will change.

What about blueprints?

They aren’t handled through Marketplace. You’ll continue to import them from a URL: a file on GitHub, a Gist, a Home Assistant forum post, or any YAML file online.

Home Assistant stores the original address, and the reimport feature lets you fetch a new version from the same location. There’s no update entity, though, so you’ll have to remember to check yourself.

Categories to help you find your way

Marketplace arrives alongside another initiative: organizing integrations into categories. With more than 1,500 official integrations, searching by name alone is becoming a pain.

The developers have defined 28 categories, sometimes divided into subcategories: lighting, climate, energy, electric vehicle charging, and so on. Custom integrations can declare them in their manifest.json file, and displaying them in Marketplace is already in the works.

Eventually, we should be able to search for an extension based on what we want to do, without knowing its name. For a beginner, that makes a big difference.

A stepping stone to the Core?

The way Home Assistant presents Marketplace to developers caught my attention. An integration or a card can start its life in Marketplace. If the project matures, finds an audience, and offers real value, its creators can then talk with the Home Assistant team about potentially bringing it into the Core.

Marketplace could therefore serve as a gateway between community experiments and official features. Given how quickly the community releases new integrations and cards, I like the idea.

The end of the HACS we knew

HACS isn’t really going away; its status is changing. The catalog is still there, developers still use the hacs.json file, and HACS validation tools remain central to the system. Home Assistant itself sums up Marketplace like this: it’s HACS integrated into Home Assistant, with as few changes as possible.

For users, this is almost entirely positive. Beginners no longer have to figure out how to install HACS. Updates appear alongside the others, installation is simpler, migration is automatic, and the interface is part of the system.

Just one caveat to keep in mind: an extension downloaded from Marketplace is still a community extension. It doesn’t offer the same guarantees as an integration maintained by the Home Assistant team.

For years, HACS was the first thing people recommended installing after Home Assistant. Starting with 2026.11, we won’t have to do that anymore. For everyone who helped make HACS what it is all these years, this is wonderful recognition!