Best Home Security Systems for Home Assistant (Local vs Cloud)
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Looking up the phrase "Home Assistant is not a professional monitoring service"? That is a real limitation and it has a real answer, which is not the same answer for everyone. Skip to what that warning means and what you can do about it.
If you run Home Assistant, "works with Home Assistant" is not one feature - it is two very different ones, and the difference matters more for a security system than for anything else in your house. A light bulb that loses its integration is an inconvenience. An alarm that loses its integration when your internet drops, or when a manufacturer quietly changes an API, is a security hole.
This guide sorts the realistic options by the question that actually decides whether Home Assistant control will be dependable: does the system talk to Home Assistant locally, on your own network, or only through the manufacturer's cloud? We are describing documented integration behavior from official Home Assistant integration pages and vendor documentation, not results from a lab we do not run.
Local vs cloud: the distinction the badge hides
A "Home Assistant compatible" claim can mean either of these, and the marketing rarely tells you which:
- Local integration. Home Assistant communicates with the alarm hardware directly on your LAN. Arming, sensor states, and the siren keep working during an internet outage or a vendor-cloud outage. Nothing about your alarm's state travels to a third party, and a manufacturer app update cannot silently break your automation.
- Cloud integration. Home Assistant reaches the system by calling the manufacturer's servers over the internet. It works when everything is up, but it depends on three things staying healthy at once: your broadband, the vendor's cloud, and an API the vendor is under no obligation to keep stable. Many of these integrations rely on reverse-engineered APIs, so they break without warning when the vendor changes something.
For a smart-home enthusiast the appeal of local control is partly privacy and partly principle. For a security system it is also reliability: the whole point of an alarm is that it works at the worst moment, which is exactly when the internet might be down. That is why our recommendations lean toward local integration, and why we are explicit about which options are cloud-bound.
One more thing to set expectations before the list: local integration is not the same as monitoring. A locally controlled Home Assistant alarm will flash your lights, sound a siren, and push a notification to your phone, but no one is dispatching police unless you arrange that yourself. That gap is the single most common thing people are surprised by, so it gets its own section next.
"Home Assistant is not a professional monitoring service": what that means, and what you can do about it
Sooner or later, usually while setting up an alarm dashboard or reading the small print on a subscription page, most Home Assistant users run into a sentence along the lines of Home Assistant is not a professional monitoring service. It is an accurate warning, and it is worth understanding exactly what it does and does not say.
What it means in practice. When your Home Assistant alarm triggers, the siren sounds and your phone buzzes. That is the end of the chain. No central station receives the signal, no operator calls you to verify, and nobody is dispatched. Home Assistant is open-source automation software maintained by a community; it is not a licensed alarm monitoring company and has never claimed to be one. If you are asleep, on a plane, or simply not looking at your phone, an alarm event produces noise and nothing more.
What it does not mean. It does not mean your setup is broken, badly built, or a bad idea. A local Home Assistant alarm does several things a monitored system does: it detects, it records state, it makes noise, and it can turn on every light in the house. It also does one thing a monitored system generally cannot, which is keep working with the internet down. The missing piece is specifically the dispatch layer.
It also does not mean paying for Home Assistant Cloud fixes it. That subscription buys remote access, voice assistant integration and webhooks. It is not monitoring, and no amount of it causes anyone to be dispatched.
The good news most pages on this subject miss
The question is almost always framed as a choice: either you keep local Home Assistant control, or you accept a monitored system and give up the local integration. On a DSC or Honeywell Vista panel, that is a false choice, and the evidence is in the documentation of the two parties involved.
Home Assistant's own EnvisaLink integration page describes connecting to the board over your local network on port 4025, and is explicit about which credentials to use: the username and password must be the ones for "connecting directly to the device and not the username for your EyezOn account". So Home Assistant talks to the board on its local interface, while the EyezOn account, which is the channel a monitoring service runs through, is separate. Two channels, one piece of hardware.
And EyezOn, the company that makes the EnvisaLink, sells monitoring on it. Its published service is full UL/ULC central station dispatch over IP or LTE, at $8.99 a month on the one-year prepaid plan (a $49 one-time account set-up fee plus $107.88 for the first year at sign-up) or $8.50 a month on a three-year term billed monthly, again with the $49 set-up fee. EyezOn states that burglary, fire, panic, medical and carbon monoxide signals are all included at no extra cost, and that the service is offered in the USA and Canada only.
Those are the prices EyezOn published on its own site on the access date in the Sources section below. We have no commercial relationship with EyezOn, we have not tested its monitoring response times, and we are not telling you it is the best option. We are telling you it exists at that price, because the pages currently answering this question do not mention it at all.
Before you buy anything, ask one question in writing. Confirm with the provider that your exact panel, module revision and firmware will carry a monitored account while the local interface stays available to Home Assistant. Our reading of both companies' documentation says it will, but a documented reading is not a tested installation, and a written yes from the people taking your money costs nothing.
Your route depends on what your sensors are actually plugged into
| What you have | Route to professional dispatch | Published cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| DSC PowerSeries or Honeywell Vista panel with an EnvisaLink | EyezOn UL/ULC central station monitoring on the same board | $8.50 to $8.99 per month, plus a $49 one-time set-up fee | USA and Canada only. DSC PowerSeries Pro (NEO) needs an UNO4 module as well. Confirm your panel revision first |
| Konnected boards on existing wired sensors | Noonlight, named by Konnected as its professional monitoring partner | Not published (see below) | There is no official Home Assistant Noonlight integration, and Noonlight no longer publishes consumer pricing on its own site |
| Qolsys, 2GIG, Interlogix, GE or an ADT-badged Vista panel | An alarm system takeover by an independent monitoring company | Independent providers publish entry plans from roughly $8 to $19 per month | Needs the installer code and the previous company's release of the communicator. Our takeover guide covers both gates |
| A pure Z-Wave or Zigbee build with no alarm panel | No direct route to a central station | Not applicable | There is nothing for a monitoring company to receive a signal from. Adding dispatch means adding a panel, which means most of a new system |
| Ring, SimpliSafe, Vivint or Abode hardware | That vendor's own monitoring plan only | Vendor's published plan pricing | No independent company can monitor these, and the Home Assistant integration stays cloud-dependent either way |
On the Noonlight route, two honest caveats. Konnected's own support documentation lists "connect to emergency services via Noonlight, Konnected's professional monitoring partners" among the capabilities of a Home Assistant alarm, so the partnership is real and stated by the vendor. But we could not price it from primary sources: home-assistant.io/integrations/noonlight/ does not exist, so there is no official core integration, and Noonlight's own pricing page returns a 404 while its homepage now addresses developers and businesses rather than homeowners. We are not going to invent a monthly figure for it. If this is your route, get a current quote directly from Konnected before planning around it.
When adding monitoring is the wrong answer
- Nobody arms the system. Dispatch on an alarm that is never set is a subscription to nothing. Sort the habit first.
- You built it locally on purpose, for privacy. A monitored account means a company holds your keyholder details and receives your alarm events. That is a reasonable trade for dispatch, but it is a real trade, and it is the opposite of why some people run Home Assistant.
- Your city charges for false alarms. Professional dispatch is the thing that generates billable false alarms, and a DIY setup with aggressive automations is a good way to produce them. Check what your city charges in our alarm permit and false-alarm fine index before you switch dispatch on, not after.
- A trusted-neighbour arrangement covers it. For some households a notification plus somebody nearby with a key genuinely is the proportionate answer. Our professional versus self-monitoring guide works through when it is and is not.
The genuinely local options (no cloud dependency)
1. Build it in Home Assistant itself (the most local, lowest ongoing cost)
The most private and most resilient "system" is not a branded product at all - it is Home Assistant acting as the panel. Home Assistant's built-in Manual alarm control panel (or the widely used community add-on Alarmo) provides arm-away, arm-home, disarm, entry and exit delays, and trigger logic, all running on your own hardware. You supply the physical parts with an open radio protocol, usually Z-Wave or Zigbee: door and window contacts, motion sensors, a siren, and a keypad.
Because the logic runs locally, the alarm keeps functioning if your internet drops, and there is no monthly fee at all. Community build guides put the hardware for a three-bedroom home in the rough range of $250 to $350, one-time. Commonly cited components include a Z-Wave controller stick such as the Zooz ZST39 (around $35, with S2 encryption and long-range support), a loud Z-Wave siren such as the Aeotec Siren 6 (around $50, roughly 105 dB with a tamper switch), and the Ring Alarm Keypad Gen 2 (around $40), which pairs natively to Home Assistant's alarm-panel entity over Z-Wave and gives you real arm and disarm buttons plus code entry. Treat those prices as planning figures to verify, not quotes.
Best for: people who genuinely enjoy running Home Assistant and want zero cloud, zero fees, and total control. Worst for: anyone who wants a polished app out of the box or professional dispatch - here, you are the integrator and, unless you add a monitoring layer, you are also the monitor.
2. Konnected (turn a wired panel into a local Home Assistant alarm)
If your home already has hardwired door, window, and motion sensors - the legacy of an old DSC, Honeywell, or GE install - Konnected is the cleanest way to bring them into Home Assistant without ripping anything out. Its Alarm Panel boards are ESPHome-compatible and either replace the old panel (a conversion kit) or sit alongside it (an interface kit), exposing every existing sensor to Home Assistant. Konnected markets the setup as fully local with no required monthly fee, and its boards can run local alarm logic so a Home Assistant outage does not disable the alarm.
Best for: homes with existing wired sensors you want to reuse locally. Worst for: renters or homes with no existing wiring, where the DIY Z-Wave route above is simpler and cheaper.
3. Envisalink (keep a pro-installed DSC or Honeywell panel, add local control)
Another way to preserve an existing wired system is the Envisalink board from EyezOn, which gives a DSC or Honeywell/Vista panel a TCP/IP interface on your local network. Home Assistant's official Envisalink integration is event-based and reports partition status, so you can arm and disarm and react to sensors in near real time, all locally. The Envisalink v4 (roughly $100, one-time) is the current model; the integration also supports the older evl3.
EyezOn's own product selector lists the compatible panels as DSC PowerSeries (1555, 1555 MX, 1575, 5010/832, 5020/864, 1616, 1832 and 1864), DSC PowerSeries Pro (NEO), which needs an UNO4 module as well, and Honeywell Vista 10P, 15P, 20P, 21iP, 128P and 250P. This is also the one local route with a documented paid path to central-station dispatch, covered in the monitoring section above.
Best for: owners of a functioning DSC or Honeywell/Vista panel who want smart, local control without a new system, and the only local route where adding professional monitoring later does not mean starting over. Worst for: anyone starting from scratch, since it presumes you already have a compatible wired panel.
The cloud-dependent integrations (they work, but lean on the vendor)
These are real, in some cases official, integrations. They can be the right call if you already own the hardware and accept the trade-off. Just know that each one routes through the internet and the manufacturer's servers, so an outage on either end, or a vendor API change, can take your control offline.
Ring Alarm - official but cloud-only
Home Assistant's official Ring integration connects through Ring's cloud API; it does not talk to your devices locally. The alarm panel and Ring's Z-Wave sensors are supported, and a popular community add-on, ring-mqtt, adds richer features (panic buttons, event snapshots, live streaming) - but it is still cloud-based. Ring Alarm is architected around Ring's own app and cloud, so local, third-party control was never a design goal. If you already own Ring Alarm, the integration is usable; if privacy is a driver for choosing Home Assistant in the first place, weigh Ring's documented history of privacy and law-enforcement-access issues, which we lay out in our home security camera privacy scorecard.
Abode - official cloud integration, broad by design
Abode has one of Home Assistant's longer-standing official integrations (its Abode integration dates back to Home Assistant 0.52) and the company positions itself around wide smart-home compatibility. It brings the alarm and its sensors into Home Assistant to trigger automations. It is cloud-based, and unlocking the system's full capability generally means an Abode subscription, so budget for the recurring cost if you go this route.
SimpliSafe - integrates, but treat it as fragile
SimpliSafe is the cautionary tale. An official SimpliSafe integration exists, but it is cloud-based, requires a manual web-authentication step to set up, and has a documented reliability problem. Community reports describe it dropping offline several times a day, and since the Home Assistant 2024.6 change to how alarm-panel entities validate codes, the integration can no longer reliably arm or disarm SimpliSafe systems, because SimpliSafe's API insists a code is required. In practice, plan on read-mostly, intermittent sensor data rather than dependable control. Choosing SimpliSafe because of Home Assistant would be a mistake; if you already own it, keep your expectations low and do not build critical automations on top of it.
The systems that essentially do not integrate
Two of the most heavily advertised names are the weakest fit here. Vivint and ADT are proprietary, professionally installed ecosystems with no official or reliable local Home Assistant path for consumers. There is no consumer-facing local API to build on, and their business model is the opposite of the open, no-fee, self-controlled setup Home Assistant users usually want. If deep Home Assistant integration is a genuine requirement, cross both off the list - and if you are trying to leave a Vivint or ADT contract to do exactly that, our guide to cancelling ADT without a termination fee and our costs and contracts guide cover the exit terms first.
Quick decision table
| Option | Integration type | Ongoing fee | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Assistant + Z-Wave/Zigbee (Alarmo or Manual) | Fully local | None | Enthusiasts wanting maximum control and no cloud |
| Konnected | Fully local | None required | Homes with existing hardwired sensors to reuse |
| Envisalink | Fully local | None required; optional UL/ULC monitoring published from $8.50 per month plus a $49 set-up fee | Existing DSC or Honeywell/Vista wired panels, and anyone who wants local control now and professional dispatch later |
| Ring Alarm | Cloud only | Optional Ring plan for pro monitoring | Existing Ring owners who accept cloud dependence |
| Abode | Cloud only | Subscription for full features | Buyers who want a packaged system and accept cloud |
| SimpliSafe | Cloud, unreliable | Monitoring plan for most features | Nobody choosing a system for Home Assistant |
| Vivint / ADT | None (proprietary) | Contract | Not Home Assistant users |
How to choose, in one paragraph
If local control is why you use Home Assistant, pick one of the local routes: build it yourself with Z-Wave or Zigbee and Alarmo for a new setup and zero fees, use Konnected to reuse existing wired sensors, or add Envisalink to a working DSC or Honeywell panel. Reach for a cloud integration (Ring or Abode) only if you already own the hardware and accept the internet dependence, and treat SimpliSafe as a bonus rather than a plan. Whichever way you go, decide the monitoring question separately - a local alarm is only as good as who responds to it, and on a DSC or Honeywell panel you do not have to give up local control to get dispatch - and if avoiding recurring fees is the goal, our no-contract systems comparison shows what you keep and give up at each level.
Where to go next
- How to choose a home security system (without getting upsold) - the full framework this page fits inside
- Best no-contract home security systems (research-based)
- Professional vs self-monitoring: an honest decision guide
- Alarm system takeover: switch monitoring, keep the panel - the route to professional dispatch if your panel is not a DSC or Honeywell with an EnvisaLink
- Alarm permit and false-alarm fine index - what your city charges once dispatch is switched on
- Home security camera privacy scorecard - encryption, local storage, and breach history by brand
- Free printable home security checklist - the low-cost basics that help before any system
Sources
- Home Assistant - Manual alarm control panel integration (accessed 2026-07-08)
- SmartHomeScene - Alarmo: build your own alarm system in Home Assistant (accessed 2026-07-08)
- Botmonster - Local Z-Wave alarm system with Home Assistant (hardware and cost) (accessed 2026-07-08)
- Konnected - Home Assistant home security (local, no monthly fee) (accessed 2026-07-08)
- Home Assistant - Envisalink integration (DSC / Honeywell panels; local TCP interface on port 4025, device credentials distinct from the EyezOn account) (accessed 2026-07-08 and re-checked 2026-08-10)
- EyezOn - UL/ULC IP alarm monitoring plans ($8.99 one-year prepaid with $49 set-up and $107.88 first year; $8.50 three-year term; included signal types; USA and Canada only) (accessed 2026-08-10)
- EyezOn - product selector and EVL4/DUO compatible panel list (accessed 2026-08-10)
- Konnected - Home Assistant as a Security System (Noonlight named as professional monitoring partner) (accessed 2026-08-10)
- Noonlight - homepage, current business-to-business positioning; the company's pricing page and the Home Assistant Noonlight integration page both returned not-found errors (accessed 2026-08-10)
- Home Assistant - Ring integration (cloud) (accessed 2026-07-08)
- ring-mqtt Home Assistant add-on (accessed 2026-07-08)
- Home Assistant - Abode integration (accessed 2026-07-08)
- Home Assistant - SimpliSafe integration (accessed 2026-07-08)
- Home Assistant core issue #119776 - SimpliSafe can no longer arm/disarm after alarm-panel code validation change (accessed 2026-07-08)