EMQX vs ESPresense
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 EMQX with
choose an app… Home Assistant Frigate ntfy Homebridge Tasmota ThingsBoard WLED 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 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 Calaos ESPHome Web Tools Habapp FHEM LHA Onloc Find My Device
Compare ESPresense with
choose an app… Home Assistant Frigate ntfy Homebridge Tasmota ThingsBoard WLED Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT Traccar OwnTracks Recorder
Feature EMQX ESPresense Category Home Automation Home Automation License Apache-2.0 MIT Language Erlang C Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 16 MB Deployment docker binary, source GitHub stars ★ 16,599 ★ 1,459 First released 2026 2020 Replaces — Life360
Why pick each one
Choose EMQX if… Released under the Apache-2.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 16.6k GitHub stars Written in Erlang EMQX details
Frequently asked questions Is EMQX or ESPresense better? Neither is universally better. EMQX has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are EMQX and ESPresense free and open-source? Yes. EMQX is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ESPresense under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run EMQX and ESPresense with Docker? EMQX: yes. ESPresense: check the project docs for container support.