The Local Control Index: what survives when the internet does not

The results#

The full grid, including the criteria trimmed from the table above and the reasoning for each score, is in the dataset. Scoring rules and criterion weights are on the methodology page.

Why we score capability, not configuration#

The index measures what a platform can do, not what your particular installation does. A Home Assistant user who runs every automation through a cloud integration has a cloud-dependent house on a platform scoring 100. That is a fair criticism of the score and a deliberate design choice: the platform decision is the one you make once and live with, while the configuration is something you can change on a Tuesday evening.

For the configuration question, the internet outage audit applies the same logic to the specific devices you own, which is usually the more useful number.

What each criterion actually tests#

Local app control on the LAN (20 points)#

The plainest test in the index: with the internet gone and your phone on the house Wi-Fi, can you open the app and turn a light off? Apple Home, Hubitat and Home Assistant can. Google Home can for lights, plugs and switches, which is why it scores half. Alexa cannot.

This is worth 20 points because it is the difference between an inconvenience and a house that has stopped responding to its owners.

Local automation execution (20 points)#

Whether the rules run on hardware you own. Apple Home runs automations on the hub, which is why an Apple household barely notices a short outage. Google Home's routines run in Google's cloud, so a broadband failure means motion sensors trigger nothing at all. SmartThings sits in between, because Edge drivers execute on the hub while the documentation does not make clear which routines follow.

Local voice control (10 points)#

Only Home Assistant scores here, and only because it offers a complete on-device pipeline: wake word, speech to text, intent matching and text to speech, all runnable on your own hardware. Every other platform sends audio to a server for recognition. Amazon's position hardened in March 2025 when it removed the on-device processing option from the three Echo models that had it, with no opt-out.

Ten points rather than twenty, because voice is a convenience layer. When it fails you can still use a switch.

Local state and sensor reporting (10 points)#

Whether a motion event reaches the controller without a round trip. This is the criterion that decides whether "the lights come on when I walk in" survives an outage, and it is closely tied to automation execution.

Survives a vendor shutdown (15 points)#

The long-horizon question: if the company disappeared tomorrow, would the system keep working? Home Assistant and Hubitat score full marks because the software runs on your hardware. Apple Home scores half: existing setups would keep functioning locally, but commissioning new devices and household sharing depend on iCloud. The bottom three score zero, and the Belkin Wemo shutdown in January 2026 is the worked example of what that means in practice.

Local API or integration surface (10 points)#

Whether third parties can talk to the system on your network. This is what makes a platform composable: dashboards, presence systems, energy monitoring, and the small scripts that make a house feel personal. Apple Home scores zero here, which surprises people who assume HomeKit's local architecture implies local access.

Local firmware and backup control (10 points)#

Can you back up your configuration and restore it, and can devices be updated without a vendor cloud in the path? Apple Home offers no way to export a home configuration at all, which is a genuine risk that gets little attention.

No account required (5 points)#

The lightest criterion, and the one that reveals intent. A platform that will not complete setup without a vendor account has told you where it thinks the system lives.

What the numbers do not capture#

• Outage duration. A platform that fails gracefully for ten minutes is different from one that fails for the twelve hours Google Home was unavailable in August 2026. The index does not model duration.
• Partial failures. Real outages are messy: DNS resolves but nothing routes, or a vendor's regional endpoint fails while the rest of the internet works. Devices frequently behave worse in these cases than in a clean disconnection, because they retry rather than fall back.
• Power cuts. A different and harsher scenario. Everything mains-powered stops, including the hub and the router. A small uninterruptible power supply on the hub and router is the cheapest resilience upgrade available and is worth more than any platform choice.
• Local does not mean secure. A local system with default credentials and no updates is a worse outcome than a cloud system with a competent security team. See securing a smart home network.

How to use this if you are choosing now#

If outage resilience genuinely matters to you, the honest advice is that only two platforms deliver it, and both ask for something in return: Home Assistant asks for maintenance, Hubitat asks for tolerance of a dated interface and gives you no voice assistant of its own. If neither trade is acceptable, the realistic move is Apple Home, on the understanding that Siri and remote access will not be there.

A pattern that works well for a lot of households is documented in running two platforms on purpose: a local platform owns the devices and the automations, and a mainstream platform is added over Matter purely as a voice front end. The lights still work when the voice does not.

Method, updates and reuse#

The rubric, scoring rules and the "unknown is not zero" convention are on the methodology page. Inputs come from vendor documentation, platform release notes and published support pages, and each score carries a reasoning note in the dataset.

This index is versioned. The September 2026 edition is version 2026.09. When a platform ships a change that moves a score, the dataset version increments and the change is noted here rather than applied silently. Notable candidates for the next revision: whether SmartThings documents its local routine behavior, and whether Google extends local Matter control beyond lights, plugs and switches.

The data is published as JSON under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it, adapt it, and link back.