Calaos vs Frigate
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted home automation options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Calaos with
choose an app… Home Assistant ntfy Homebridge Tasmota ThingsBoard WLED EMQX Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT SmartHomeNG
Compare Frigate with
choose an app… Home Assistant ntfy Homebridge Tasmota ThingsBoard WLED EMQX Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT ESPHome Mosquitto HACS Home Assistant Operating System evcc Scrypted Mushroom Piper Bubble Card OpenMQTTGateway Domoticz Companion DZVents Hyperion Domoticz Home Assistant Companion ESPEasy Sonoff DIY Tools Gladys Assistant Rhasspy Mozilla WebThings Gateway openWakeWord Button Card Awtrix Light OpenBeken Home Assistant Supervisor SmartApp Bridge deCONZ ApexCharts Card OpenRemote diyHue card-mod Mini Media Player TinyTuya Server Home Assistant Floorplan HA-Bridge ESPresense Govee2MQTT ioBroker OpenEnergyMonitor Emoncms HASS.Agent Wyoming Satellite Z-Wave JS UI OwnTracks Recorder LocalTuya openHAB Frigate Cards Python Matter Server OpenHASP Tasmoadmin AppDaemon Ring-MQTT EMHASS Domoticz Plugin Hub Zigbee2MQTT Frontend OpenSprinkler Grott Growatt Monitor Zigbee2MQTT Assistant SIP Irrigation Control Jeedom Node-RED Dashboard 2.0 OpenHAB Cloud OpenVoiceOS SmartIR Theengs Gateway Zwave-JS Server SOLECTRUS SmartHomeNG Victron Venus OS Bridge Dahua2MQTT Streamline Smart Home Dashboards ESPHome Web Tools Habapp FHEM LHA Onloc Find My Device
Feature Calaos Frigate Category Home Automation Home Automation License GPL-3.0 MIT Language Shell TypeScript Setup difficulty Hard Hard Min. RAM 512 MB 2,048 MB Deployment bare-metal docker GitHub stars ★ 73 ★ 34,903 First released 2013 2020 Replaces Loxone Google Home
Why pick each one
Choose Calaos if… Polished native UIs Fully self-contained Calaos details Choose Frigate if… Smart local NVR Great with Home Assistant Privacy-friendly Frigate details
Frequently asked questions Is Calaos or Frigate better? Neither is universally better. Frigate has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Calaos and Frigate free and open-source? Yes. Calaos is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Frigate under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Calaos and Frigate with Docker? Calaos: check the project docs for container support. Frigate: yes.