ESPHome vs ThingsBoard
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 ESPHome with
choose an app… Home Assistant Frigate ntfy Homebridge Tasmota WLED EMQX Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT 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 Mozilla WebThings Gateway Home Assistant Supervisor SmartApp Bridge ioBroker Z-Wave JS UI openHAB AppDaemon Domoticz Plugin Hub Jeedom OpenHAB Cloud Zwave-JS Server FHEM
Compare ThingsBoard with
choose an app… Home Assistant Frigate ntfy Homebridge Tasmota WLED EMQX Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT 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 Calaos ESPHome Web Tools Habapp FHEM LHA Onloc Find My Device
Feature ESPHome ThingsBoard Category Home Automation Home Automation License GPL-3.0 Apache-2.0 Language C++ Java Setup difficulty Medium Hard Min. RAM 512 MB 2,048 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal docker, kubernetes, bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 11,505 ★ 22,200 First released 2018 2017 Replaces SmartThings AWS IoT, Azure IoT
Why pick each one
Choose ESPHome if… No coding needed for devices Great with Home Assistant OTA updates ESPHome details
Frequently asked questions Is ESPHome or ThingsBoard better? Neither is universally better. ThingsBoard has the larger community, while ESPHome is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are ESPHome and ThingsBoard free and open-source? Yes. ESPHome is licensed under GPL-3.0 and ThingsBoard under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run ESPHome and ThingsBoard with Docker? ESPHome: yes. ThingsBoard: yes.