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Mini PC vs Raspberry Pi 5 vs Home Assistant Green: what to run Home Assistant on

Which hardware to run Home Assistant on: Home Assistant Green, a Raspberry Pi 5 or an Intel N150 mini PC, compared on setup, specs, power draw and room to grow.

By the TechnoGecko Team· 22 October 2026 · Updated 22 October 2026· 6 min read

If you want Home Assistant running tonight with no tinkering, buy Home Assistant Green: it comes with the software installed, sips about 1.7 W at idle, and its suggested price is under $200. If you already own a Raspberry Pi 5 with at least 2 GB of RAM, it’s a fine, officially supported choice, but by the time you add a proper power supply, cooling and storage, it’s rarely the cheap option it used to be. Pick a mini PC with an Intel N150 (or similar x86 chip) if you want the most headroom for cameras, add-ons and a growing number of devices, and you’re comfortable changing a BIOS setting and writing an image to a drive. None of the three is the right place to run a local AI model; that needs a separate, more powerful machine.

At a glance

Home Assistant Green: the easy answer

Green is Home Assistant’s own hardware, built by Nabu Casa. Home Assistant’s Green page says you “simply plug in the included power adapter and Ethernet cable” to start. An internet connection is required for the first setup. The specs are modest: a quad-core Arm chip, 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of built-in eMMC storage, with a large aluminum heatsink for “noiseless CPU cooling” and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It comes with the power supply and the Ethernet cable.

What it’s good at:

• No installation step. You skip flashing images and BIOS settings entirely.
• Very low power. Home Assistant lists about 1.7 W at idle and 3 W under load at 12 V.
• Support from one company. The hardware and Home Assistant OS come from the same people.

What to know:

• No built-in Zigbee or Thread radio. Home Assistant’s ZHA docs say to add one, such as the Connect ZBT-2. Our Zigbee coordinator guide compares the options.
• USB 2.0 only. Two ports, sharing 2 A between them. That’s enough for a Zigbee or Z-Wave stick, not for an external SSD and two radios.
• Storage is fixed at 32 GB. Fine for most homes, but camera recordings and long history pile up. Plan to store those elsewhere.

Raspberry Pi 5: supported, but count the extras

Home Assistant supports the Raspberry Pi 5 and 4 with Home Assistant OS. Its installation guide asks for “a model with at least 2 GB of RAM”, a microSD card of at least 32 GB, and an Ethernet cable for the install. Once it’s running, Home Assistant can use Wi-Fi, but its docs call Ethernet “more reliable and highly recommended”.

The Pi 5 itself is a big step up from the Pi 4. Raspberry Pi says it’s up to three times faster, and its quad-core Cortex-A76 is a faster chip on paper than Green’s Cortex-A55. It also has two USB 3.0 ports and a PCIe connector for an M.2 SSD (with a separate HAT).

The catch is the shopping list. Raspberry Pi recommends “a high-quality 5V 5A USB-C power supply” and says the Pi 5 “will perform best with active cooling”. Add a case or cooler, a good microSD card or an SSD and HAT, and the total gets close to Green’s, with more assembly. A Pi you already own is a great start. A Pi bought new just for Home Assistant often isn’t the bargain it looks like.

Intel N150 mini PC: the most headroom

Home Assistant OS runs on most 64-bit x86 PCs. The generic x86-64 guide has three requirements: the system must be 64-bit, it must boot with UEFI (with Secure Boot disabled), and the boot drive can’t be one of the few SSDs that only use native 4K sectors.

The Intel N150 is a common chip in small, low-cost mini PCs. Intel lists it with four cores, a 3.6 GHz top speed, support for up to 16 GB of memory and a processor base power of 6 W. That’s the chip alone: a whole mini PC with an SSD and a power brick draws more, and the figure differs by model. Check the maker’s spec sheet.

Why choose one:

• Room to grow. More RAM and faster storage than Green, which helps with camera integrations, many add-ons and long history.
• Easy to repurpose. If you outgrow it, it’s still a useful PC.

What to know:

• The install is more hands-on. You’ll enter the BIOS, change boot settings and write Home Assistant OS to the internal drive, usually by booting a live Linux USB stick. Home Assistant’s guide walks through it.
• Quality varies. Mini PCs come from many brands. Look for a known maker, a real warranty and a BIOS that exposes UEFI settings.

What about local AI?

Running a large language model next to Home Assistant needs far more memory and compute than any of these three offer. Home Assistant’s Ollama docs describe Ollama as “an external Ollama server”, and our Ollama guide explains why the model should run on a separate machine with enough memory, ideally with a graphics card. Keep Home Assistant on small, reliable hardware and put the model elsewhere.

Which one should you buy?

• You’re new and want it to work: Home Assistant Green, plus a Connect ZBT-2 if you have or plan Zigbee devices.
• You have a Pi 5 or Pi 4 in a drawer: use it. Add a 5 V/5 A supply, cooling and a decent card or SSD.
• You expect cameras, lots of devices or many add-ons: an N150 mini PC with at least 8 GB of RAM and an SSD.
• You already run a home server: Home Assistant OS also runs in a virtual machine, and Home Assistant Container runs in Docker. Container doesn’t include apps (add-ons), per Home Assistant’s install overview, so Home Assistant OS in a VM is the closer match to the other options here.

Prices on all three move around during the holidays. Our Black Friday smart home deals page lists the deals we track.

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