WLED vs Piper
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 WLED with
choose an app… Home Assistant Frigate ntfy Homebridge Tasmota ThingsBoard EMQX Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT ESPHome Mosquitto HACS Home Assistant Operating System evcc Scrypted Mushroom 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
Compare Piper with
choose an app… Home Assistant Frigate ntfy Homebridge Tasmota ThingsBoard EMQX Frigate NVR Companion go2rtc Zigbee2MQTT ESPHome Mosquitto HACS MeloTTS Home Assistant Operating System evcc Scrypted Mushroom Bubble Card OpenMQTTGateway Domoticz Companion DZVents Hyperion Domoticz Home Assistant Companion ESPEasy Sonoff DIY Tools
Feature WLED Piper Category Home Automation Home Automation License MIT MIT Language C++ C++ Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 16 MB 256 MB Deployment binary, source docker, binary, source GitHub stars ★ 18,518 ★ 5,066 First released 2016 2023 Replaces Philips Hue Amazon Polly, Google TTS
Why pick each one
Choose WLED if… Easy to flash and use Vibrant effects WLED details Choose Piper if… Natural-sounding offline TTS Very efficient Piper details
Frequently asked questions Is WLED or Piper better? WLED is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Piper if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are WLED and Piper free and open-source? Yes. WLED is licensed under MIT and Piper under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run WLED and Piper with Docker? WLED: check the project docs for container support. Piper: yes.