Home Assistant Green or Raspberry Pi 5: which should I run Home Assistant on?

The two boxes are not the same kind of purchase#

The Green is an appliance. It ships with Home Assistant OS installed on 32 GB of eMMC, a power supply and an Ethernet cable in the box, and Home Assistant's own description of the buyer is someone "not familiar with tinkering with Raspberry Pi," or someone who wants "a well-supported and dedicated piece of hardware." You plug it in, open a browser, and start.

A Raspberry Pi 5 is a general-purpose board. Home Assistant OS runs on it officially, with the same apps as on the Green, but you choose memory, supply, case, cooling and storage, and flash the system yourself. That flexibility is the case for it, and also the hidden cost: the board price is not the build price.

Neither box has a Zigbee, Thread or Z-Wave radio. Whatever you buy, budget for the dongles listed on the Home Assistant platform page: a Connect ZBT-2 at $49 for Zigbee or Thread, a Connect ZWA-2 at $69 for Z-Wave. They cost the same on either host, so they drop out of the comparison below.

The specifications side by side#

Two rows decide most purchases. The Pi 5's PCIe interface is the only way either box gets fast storage or an AI accelerator inside it. The Green's missing Wi-Fi rarely matters, because Home Assistant calls Ethernet "required for installation" on a Pi too and "highly recommended" afterwards. Its missing Bluetooth does matter if you own Bluetooth sensors or locks: you add a USB adapter or ESPHome proxies, as covered in Bluetooth in the smart home.

What a like-for-like Pi 5 build costs in October 2026#

Like for like means the Pi build has to match what is in the Green's box: a supply that meets the board's specification, a case, cooling, and storage Home Assistant supports. Prices are PiShop.us listings checked on 9 October 2026; board prices match Raspberry Pi's April 2026 list.

Variations on the same arithmetic:

• 8 GB board instead of 4 GB: $175, so $229.80 with microSD or $328.80 with NVMe.
• 2 GB board, the minimum Home Assistant allows: $77.50 since Raspberry Pi's 1 October 2026 increase, so $133.30 with microSD. It is the cheapest supported Pi 5 build, with half the Green's memory.

The NVMe column keeps the microSD card because that is the route Home Assistant documents for Home Assistant OS: it can move its data, "including Home Assistant Core and Apps," to "a second internal SSD," and that disk "must be larger than the storage capacity of the existing (boot) disk." A 256 GB SSD behind a 32 GB card meets that rule.

So the honest headline is that the cheap Pi build undercuts the Green by about $34, and the SSD build costs about $65 more. Neither is the "Pi is half the price" figure that circulated when a 4 GB Pi 5 was $60.

The $99 figure, settled#

The Green launched at $99, and that number is still repeated in guides and forum answers. It is out of date twice over. Nabu Casa raised it to $159 in January 2026 and to $199 (179 euros) on 24 April 2026, saying the component cost of building a Green "has nearly doubled" since production started, driven by memory prices.

The same memory squeeze hit the Pi. Raspberry Pi raised Pi 4 and Pi 5 prices in February 2026, again on 1 April 2026 (a $25 increase for 4 GB boards, $50 for 8 GB, $100 for the 16 GB Pi 5 that now lists at $305), citing a "seven-fold increase over the last year in the price of LPDDR4 DRAM," and again for 2 GB boards on 1 October 2026. A comparison pairing a $99 Green with a $60 Pi uses two launch prices that no longer exist.

Power: a real difference that will not pay for anything#

Home Assistant rates the Green at about 1.7 W idle and about 3 W under load. Raspberry Pi's product page and documentation give the supply rating, not an idle figure; Jeff Geerling measured 3.3 W idle on a 4 GB board, 3.2 W on an 8 GB and 2.4 W on the newer 2 GB board. These are not the same test, so treat the comparison as approximate.

The rate is the Energy Information Administration's US residential average for July 2026. At that rate the Green saves about $2.56 a year against an idle 4 GB Pi 5, so closing the $34 gap to the cheap Pi build would take about 13 years. Choose on features. Either draws little enough to run on a small UPS through an outage, the setup in what still works when the internet goes down.

Storage: eMMC, microSD and NVMe#

This is the row people argue about most and source least.

eMMC (the Green). 32 GB, and the only storage the Green boots from; its microSD slot is "recovery purposes only."

microSD (a stock Pi). Home Assistant's Raspberry Pi instructions ask for a card that is "Application Class 2," with "the label A2 on the card," of "at least 32 GB." That is a performance class. Home Assistant's install pages publish no failure rates for any storage type, so any card lifespan figure you read is not theirs.

NVMe (a Pi with the M.2 HAT+). The Pi 5's PCIe 2.0 x1 link peaks at 500 MB/s per Raspberry Pi. Home Assistant's own words on a data disk are that "a fast data disk will make the system much faster overall."

The practical reliability point Home Assistant does document is power, not wear. It warns that a USB-attached SSD "can draw quite some power" and suggests a stronger supply or a powered hub. On a Pi 5 this is concrete: Raspberry Pi's documentation says a 5 V 3 A supply limits USB peripherals to 600 mA. A phone charger in place of a 5 A supply is the easy mistake, and Home Assistant's install page says plainly that mobile chargers "may not be suitable." The Green sidesteps the question by shipping its own 12 V supply.

Whatever you run on, backups are the real protection: a failed card or eMMC is then a restore rather than a rebuild. Moving from one box to the other later is a restore too, and Zigbee coordinator migration covers carrying a radio network across. A full platform change is a different job, set out in switching platforms.

The workloads that push past the Green#

Home Assistant sells the Green on "a fast and smooth Home Assistant user experience," and every Pi 5 above 1 GB meets the stated memory minimum, so the core job of automations, dashboards and radios is covered either way. Two workloads change the answer.

Camera AI with Frigate. Frigate supports the Hailo-8 and Hailo-8L accelerators "on compatible hardware platforms, including the Raspberry Pi 5 with the PCIe hat from the AI kit." The Green has no PCIe, only USB 2.0, which leaves USB accelerators such as the Coral, and Frigate now says the Coral "is no longer recommended for new Frigate installations, except in deployments with particularly low power requirements." Two caveats on the Pi route: Frigate's Hailo setup steps are written for Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm rather than Home Assistant OS, and the Pi 5 has one PCIe interface, which both the AI kit and the M.2 HAT+ connect to. Frigate also notes that under Home Assistant OS, "separate local storage for media is not yet supported," so recordings share the system disk, which on a Green is 32 GB of eMMC. Frigate's own baseline is "anything with an Intel CPU (with AVX + AVX2 instructions)" running Debian. If cameras are the point, read smart cameras first and plan a separate machine.

Local voice. Home Assistant documents two speech-to-text engines with very different needs. Speech-to-Phrase is "extremely fast" and under one second "even on a Home Assistant Green or Raspberry Pi 4." Whisper takes "around 8 seconds" per command on a Raspberry Pi 4 and under a second on an Intel NUC. That page gives no Whisper figure for the Green or the Pi 5. If Speech-to-Phrase covers what you say, the Green handles voice. If you want Whisper running locally, the fast reference point Home Assistant documents is x86 hardware, not either board.

Radios, USB ports and placement#

The Green's two USB 2.0 ports share 2 A at 5 V. USB 2.0 is no handicap for radios: USB 3.0 ports emit broadband noise across 2.4 GHz, which is why Nabu Casa ships an extension cable with the ZBT-2. On a Pi 5, put radios on extension cables away from the USB 3.0 ports, for the reasons in 2.4 GHz interference and channel planning and Z-Wave 800 vs 700. Either box hosts a Thread border router through a ZBT-2; how it fits beside the others in your house is in Thread border routers, and keeping it on Ethernet follows network setup for a smart home.

Pick by what you will do with it#

Limits: prices are October 2026 US listings in a market that has moved repeatedly this year, the Pi power figures are one reviewer's measurements, and none of this covers a mini PC. Both boxes score the same on the Local Control Index, because the score belongs to the software. If the bigger question is whether to run Home Assistant at all or buy a hub that maintains itself, compare it with Hubitat, or start from do you need a smart home hub.