Home Assistant 2026.11: HACS becomes a built-in Marketplace, 38 new integrations, biggest release yet

Home Assistant shipped 2026.11 on November 4. The second line of the announcement reads: “This is the biggest release we’ve ever shipped, by far. It’s ridiculously large.”

I usually discount that kind of self-assessment. This time the table of contents convinced me: 38 new integrations, 5,827 pull requests, 557 contributors, and one design change four years in the making.

HACS moved into Settings and became the Marketplace

For years, installing a community integration meant installing HACS first: a store that was not official but that everyone had. It required dropping files in place, restarting, and clicking through confirmations. It was the single biggest reason newcomers gave up.

As of this release it is a built-in Marketplace, under Settings, on every installation type. The author’s wording is careful: “If you use HACS today, it should feel like only the name changed. Everything you installed stays installed and keeps getting updates.”

The significance is not the feature. It is the barrier. An open-source project’s real enemy is never a competitor; it is a first step that is too much work. HACS’s maintainer donated the project to the Open Home Foundation and it became official. That path is worth noting on its own: something the community built, adopted rather than replaced.

Excluding items from a target (which I have wanted for years)

The most common automation request is: “turn on every light downstairs, except the one in the kitchen.”

The old way was listing every light, or building a template around it. Now targets support exclusion, and it stays smart: add another light to the kitchen next month and it is excluded too, with no change to the automation.

It looks small. It is the difference between an automation that survives a renovation and one that does not.

Entity naming, reworked: this is a breaking change

The four-year project is naming. The logic moves from “give every entity a full name” to “name the thing once, and Home Assistant adds context where it helps”.

The author adds the warning himself: this is a breaking change, and some names on your dashboards will look different after updating. Plenty of projects bury breaking changes in an appendix. Fewer put them in the opening.

The rest that is worth a look

• Matter cameras, with two-way talk: speak through the doorbell camera
• LoRaWAN support: sensors kilometres away on multi-year batteries can now join
• Backups and media on local drives, without routing everything through a NAS
• “Why did that happen”: see what triggered an automation, follow a trace into the script it called, per-integration live logs, and remove bad readings from history
• Batteryless Zigbee Green Power switches, powered by the press itself

A personal note

My home automations have run for three years, and the thing that breaks is never the devices. It is names and ownership. A light called “Living Room Light 2” is a mystery three months later. Reworking naming means I will have a pile of things to fix, but when it is done, “name the thing once” finally matches how people think. Your house should use your house’s words.

One more thing about the community side: November 7 was Community Day, with 97 meetups in more than 30 countries, and November is “What the Heck?!” month again, this time about the other people who live in your home: partners, kids, housemates. That theme says more about what this project is for than any feature list.