Smart plugs for Home Assistant: Shelly, Tapo or Tasmota, and what still needs the cloud

Anyone who wants to know what the washing machine, the dryer or the server rack draw in a Home Assistant house often reaches for a Wi-Fi plug that measures. The choice is large, and the differences that matter are not on the box: whether the device works without a vendor account, how much load it carries and whether the integration fits your Home Assistant install. Three kinds are read here against the Home Assistant documentation and the vendor pages. None of these plugs has been bought or measured, so the numbers are datasheet values.

What to decide first

Three questions drive the choice, in this order.

The order of questions before buying a Wi-Fi plug. (Quelle: Our own summary of the sources below, as of 16 Oct 2026)

Measuring alone needs no switching logic that someone has to maintain. Whether an appliance should be switched at all is decided by its label, not by convenience.

The three kinds compared

	Shelly Plug S Gen3	Tapo P110M	Tasmota plug (Athom)
Load as listed	12 A, 2500 W (retailer)	16 A, 3680 W (vendor)	16 A (seller)
Home Assistant integration	local, no cloud needed	local, but TP-Link account needed	local via Tasmota/ESPHome
Matter	in the MTR variant	yes, certified	depends on firmware
Metering accuracy	not found	not stated	listings disagree

Maximum load for a resistive load as listed. The Athom value is calculated from 16 A and 230 V and not stated by the seller. (Quelle: Tapo P110M vendor page and retailer listings, 16 Oct 2026)

On the Shelly figure: the 12 A and 2500 W come from retailer pages, because we could not read the manufacturer page. At 230 V, 12 A works out to about 2760 W, so the listed 2500 W sits below that. For the Tapo the vendor states 16 A and 3680 W.

Shelly: local without the cloud

The Home Assistant documentation says the Shelly integration communicates directly with the device and needs no cloud connection. Its class is local push: devices of generation 2 and later report changes over RPC. From firmware 2.0.0 there is also Enhanced Security with HTTPS on port 443. Devices updated from older firmware serve only HTTP at first, and you have to switch the option on yourself.

Tapo: connected locally, but not without an account

The Home Assistant integration for TP-Link says it connects to devices locally without going through the TP-Link cloud. For Tapo devices it still asks for the email and password of the TP-Link account. On some firmware versions "Third-Party Compatibility" must be enabled in the Tapo app, otherwise the fix is a factory reset and blocking the internet access. That is no reason to rule it out, but it is a dependency on a vendor account that Shelly and Tasmota do not have.

Tasmota and ESPHome: open, but check the revision

Pre-flashed plugs from Athom run Tasmota or ESPHome and talk locally. The listings disagree on the metering chip, though: one seller names the HLW8032 and an active power error of about 0.2 percent without calibration, a Tasmota community template names the CSE7766 and asks for calibration to get accurate values. Which revision you get is on the seller's product page. If you want exact readings, calibrate against a reference meter.

The Matter trap with Home Assistant in a container

Matter looks like the answer: local, vendor-neutral, no cloud. For Home Assistant in a container that does not hold without caveats. The documentation names the official Matter Server on Home Assistant OS as the only supported setup. Running it as a standalone Docker container is explicitly unsupported and at your own risk. Here Home Assistant runs as a container in an LXC, so this is not the easy path for us.

The network adds to it. Matter needs local IPv6 and mDNS, which means multicast. The documentation warns about VLANs, filtered multicast and faulty IGMP snooping and asks for Wi-Fi devices to sit in the same VLAN as Home Assistant. That clashes with the obvious plan to put all plugs in a separate IoT network. With Shelly and Tasmota the problem disappears, because they speak plain IP.

How we would wire the plugs into the control

Loxone stays the controller here. A plug reports consumption to Home Assistant, and what gets switched is decided by Loxone through a virtual input. If Home Assistant fails or restarts, no switch state changes. For a power cut you decide per device whether it comes back on, off or in its last state. A coffee machine must not start heating on its own after an outage.

Heaters, instantaneous water heaters and appliances with a continuous load close to the limit do not belong on a plug with a radio module. A relay in the distribution board is the right part for those.

What we recommend and when

With Home Assistant as a container and no wish for vendor accounts, take Shelly or a Tasmota/ESPHome plug. With Shelly, check the appliance label against the limit, since only 12 A is listed. The Tapo P110M carries more load but needs a TP-Link account. Matter pays off once Home Assistant OS with the Matter Server runs and the plugs sit in the same VLAN.

How accurate the metering is stays open. Comparable figures are missing, and none of these plugs has been measured against a reference meter.

How we worked

The basis is the Home Assistant documentation pages on Shelly, TP-Link and Matter, the Tapo P110M product page and retailer and community listings for the Shelly Plug S Gen3 and the Athom plugs, read on 16 October 2026. We could not read the manufacturer page of the Shelly Plug S Gen3, so its load figures come from retailers. We have not bought or measured any of these plugs, and we found no metering accuracy for the Shelly or the Tapo.