Home Assistant brings HACS into Core: the Marketplace arrives with 2026.11

The Home Assistant Community Store, HACS, becomes a permanent part of Home Assistant. The built-in version is called Marketplace and sits under Settings → Marketplace. Matter Alpha reported the first merges into the development branches on 2 October, and SmarthomeAssistent names Home Assistant 2026.11 as the target on 20 October. The release notes do not exist yet, so the date is a plan and not a promise.

Sources: SmarthomeAssistent (20 October 2026) and Matter Alpha (2 October 2026). Matter Alpha names GitHub and the Open Home Foundation as its sources. (Quelle: Simple Icons, file homeassistant.svg (CC0))

What changes

HACS has been a separate install so far: you set it up, connect a GitHub account and get a community catalog of integrations, dashboard cards, themes and templates. That catalog moves into Core with the Marketplace, largely as it is. For the regular catalog the GitHub account is no longer needed. Search, filtering, project details, installing, picking versions and removing all happen in Settings. New versions of installed extensions show up under Settings → Updates, next to the regular Home Assistant updates.

Updates from the Marketplace should no longer require a Home Assistant restart, is the hope Matter Alpha voices. That is a hope, not a commitment.

What happens to existing installs

According to SmarthomeAssistent and Matter Alpha. Old HACS links are redirected to the Marketplace. (Quelle: SmarthomeAssistent, 20 October 2026)

The migration is automatic. What carries over is installed extensions, custom repository entries, the related update entities and, per Matter Alpha, the dashboard resources. Afterwards the old HACS integration and its files are removed. Automations and dashboards that use those update entities are expected to keep working. Reading the migration documentation at release is still advisable, Matter Alpha says, because individual HACS features may change.

What drops out

AppDaemon apps and Python scripts can no longer be installed or updated through the Marketplace. Files you already have stay on disk but receive no updates. Affected users are meant to see a notice. If you use such components, you need another update path before you install the November release.

Security

The Marketplace makes community code easier to reach, not better vetted. Extensions come from independent developers and do not go through the same review and maintenance as official integrations. Home Assistant does not test, audit or support them. A notice must be confirmed before every install or update, and replacing a built-in integration needs an extra confirmation. The requirements for the Works with Home Assistant certification stay the same: device makers without an open standard such as Matter, Zigbee or Z-Wave still need a Core integration.

For operators that means a built-in front end for community code lowers the bar for installing it. If you run Home Assistant in a company or a building-automation setting, decide beforehand which custom components are allowed at all, and do not click through the warning dialogs.

Preparing for the November update

Three steps make sense regardless of the exact date, and all three can be done before the update:

List the installed HACS components, cards and themes, including custom repositories.
Check whether any AppDaemon apps or Python scripts come through HACS, and plan a separate update path for them.
Take a backup before the update, and afterwards check that dashboards and automations still point at the update entities.