SHSelfHostIndex

Home Assistant Companion 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?
HO Home Assistant Companion Self-hosted backend pairing for Home Assistant mobile apps VS PI Piper Fast, local neural text-to-speech for voice assistants
FeatureHome Assistant CompanionPiper
CategoryHome AutomationHome Automation
LicenseApache-2.0MIT
LanguageKotlinC++
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM64 MB256 MB
Deploymentsourcedocker, binary, source
GitHub stars★ 3,788★ 5,066
First released20202023
ReplacesGoogle Home appAmazon Polly, Google TTS

Why pick each one

Choose Home Assistant Companion if…

  • Turns phones into sensors
  • Tight HA integration
Home Assistant Companion details

Choose Piper if…

  • Natural-sounding offline TTS
  • Very efficient
Piper details

Frequently asked questions

Is Home Assistant Companion or Piper better?

Neither is universally better. Piper has the larger community, while Home Assistant Companion is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Home Assistant Companion and Piper free and open-source?

Yes. Home Assistant Companion is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Piper under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Home Assistant Companion and Piper with Docker?

Home Assistant Companion: check the project docs for container support. Piper: yes.

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