Gladys Assistant

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 831 words

Gladys Assistant is what I recommend to the household that asked for Home Assistant, watched a 40-minute YAML video, and quietly gave up. It runs in one Docker container on a Raspberry Pi 4, the dashboard is finished on day one, the mobile app is the same web UI wrapped, and nothing phones home unless you pay for it to. The price of that calm is a device catalogue a fraction of the size of Home Assistant's, and you should know before starting which of your devices fall outside it.

The one container, and the two flags people forget

The official image is gladysassistant/gladys:v4, and the documented pattern is unusual for a home server app: host networking and the Docker socket mounted in.

services:
  gladys:
    image: gladysassistant/gladys:v4
    restart: unless-stopped
    privileged: true
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
      - SERVER_PORT=80
      - TZ=Europe/Paris
      - SQLITE_FILE_PATH=/var/lib/gladysassistant/gladys-production.db
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - /var/lib/gladysassistant:/var/lib/gladysassistant
      - /dev:/dev

Host networking is there so mDNS and UDP discovery for Hue, Sonos, Google Cast and similar find devices without you typing IP addresses. The socket mount lets Gladys update itself from the settings page and spin up the sidecar containers it uses for Zigbee2MQTT and the MQTT broker. Both are wider permissions than I would hand a media app, and they are the reason I run Gladys on a dedicated Pi rather than on the box with everything else. SQLITE_FILE_PATH matters: the whole state is one SQLite file, so your backup is that file plus the folder around it.

What it integrates with, honestly

The strong integrations are the ones a French-speaking home is likely to have, because that is where the project comes from: Zigbee via Zigbee2MQTT (managed for you), Z-Wave via Z-Wave JS UI, MQTT devices generally, Tasmota, Philips Hue, Sonos, Google Cast, Bluetooth sensors, RTSP cameras, Netatmo, Tuya, and mains energy monitoring including the French Linky meter. That list covers most starter homes. What is thin is the long tail: obscure cloud brands, most voice assistants, and the thousands of community integrations Home Assistant has accumulated. If your device list includes something you had to search hard to find a HA integration for, assume Gladys does not have it and check the integration page before you commit.

The workaround that keeps Gladys usable in a mixed house is MQTT. Anything you can get onto a broker, Gladys can treat as a device, so an ESPHome sensor or a Tasmota plug is a 5-minute add regardless of brand.

Scenes cover the common cases, not the clever ones

Automations are built as scenes in a visual editor: a trigger (device state, time, sunrise, someone arriving home, a calendar event), optional conditions, and a list of actions with delays. That handles "lights off when nobody is home after 23:00" and "warn me if the freezer temperature rises". It does not handle a 12-branch conditional with templated values, and there is no scripting layer to reach for when the editor runs out. This is the difference the catalogue summarises as less powerful automations, and it is the honest ceiling: Gladys is for people whose automations fit on a postcard.

Remote access is the paid part

Gladys is Apache-2.0 and fully local. Gladys Plus, the maintainer's subscription, adds an end-to-end encrypted relay for reaching your instance from outside without opening a port, plus a few cloud-dependent integrations. It funds the project and it is optional: a Tailscale or WireGuard tunnel gives you the same remote access for free, and I would do that before paying. The mobile app works either way.

Energy monitoring is the feature that surprises people

The dashboard's energy panel pulls from smart plugs, Zigbee power meters and utility integrations, and shows consumption per device and per day in a way Home Assistant only manages after you have configured its energy dashboard by hand. For a household whose actual motive is "which appliance is costing us money", Gladys answers that on day one with 3 smart plugs and nothing else configured.

What I'd do

Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2 GB, a Sonoff Zigbee dongle, and run Gladys alone on it with the compose file above. Add devices, build the 4 or 5 scenes the house actually needs, and set up Tailscale for remote access. Back up the SQLite directory nightly. If within 3 months you find yourself wanting an automation the scene editor cannot express, that is the signal to move to Home Assistant; the Home Assistant vs openHAB comparison covers the two bigger options. Most households never hit that wall, and for them the smaller catalogue is a fair trade for a system nobody has to maintain. The home automation category lists the rest of the field.