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Home»Selfhosting»2025.11: Pick, automate, and a slice of pie 🥧
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2025.11: Pick, automate, and a slice of pie 🥧

AndyBy AndyNovember 21, 2025No Comments12 Mins Read
2025.11: Pick, automate, and a slice of pie 🥧


Dive into Home Assistant 2025.11, a release packed with significant enhancements designed to elevate your smart home automation experience! This update refines daily interactions, from revolutionizing how you build complex automations with the intuitive new target picker to offering unparalleled flexibility in dashboard customization. For those passionate about self hosting and local control, you’ll appreciate critical performance improvements, including optimized logging for enhanced system longevity. Discover how this release empowers you with greater precision, clarity, and efficiency, setting a new standard for your open-source home automation ecosystem.

Elevating Your Smart Home Automation with Home Assistant 2025.11

November brings Home Assistant 2025.11, a release focused on refining the core experiences you interact with daily. The development team has been hard at work to deliver features that not only simplify your setup but also empower you with greater control and efficiency, reinforcing Home Assistant’s position as a leading platform for self hosting your smart home.

Precision Automation: The Revolutionary New Target Picker

Ever found yourself lost in a sea of similarly named entities when building complex automations? The struggle of distinguishing between “Ceiling light 1” and “Ceiling light 2” or understanding the scope of an area-wide automation is now a thing of the past. The brand new target picker completely overhauls this experience.

Previously, the target picker lacked crucial context, making it difficult to ascertain which device an entity belonged to or its assigned area. When targeting a floor or an entire area, you were left guessing how many entities would actually be affected. This often led users to target individual entities, sacrificing the flexibility that larger, more adaptive targets offer.

The new target picker provides full context for every selection, clearly showing the associated device and area, alongside an exact count of entities that will be affected. You can easily expand any floor, area, or device to inspect its constituent entities.

This innovation makes building scalable smart home automation simpler than ever. Automations targeting areas or floors now adapt seamlessly as you add or remove devices, eliminating the need for constant manual updates. Your automations just work, providing a more robust and future-proof setup.

Streamlined Automation Workflows: Enhanced Trigger, Condition & Action Editor

Continuing the commitment to making automations easier to create, Home Assistant 2025.11 introduces a completely redesigned dialog for adding triggers, conditions, and actions. While the changes are primarily cosmetic for now, they significantly improve readability and navigation.

The larger, two-pane layout ensures descriptions are clear and concise, making block selection straightforward. Building blocks for complex sequences (like repeats or branching logic) have been integrated into a single dialog tab, streamlining the creation process and reducing clutter in advanced automations. This improved interface lays a strong foundation for exciting future enhancements to Home Assistant’s powerful smart home automation capabilities.

Ultimate Dashboard Customization & Clarity

Following the entity picker’s upgrade in May 2025, this release extends similar flexibility to your dashboards. You now have granular control over how entity names appear on your cards, choosing to display just the entity name, the device name, area, floor, or any combination thereof. This level of customization allows you to tailor your dashboard to perfection, ensuring optimal readability and aesthetics for your unique self hosting setup.

Even better, if you rename an entity or device, your dashboards automatically stay in sync, eliminating tedious manual updates and ensuring your interface remains consistent and accurate.

Insightful Energy Monitoring with New Pie Charts

For fans of the energy dashboard, 2025.11 introduces a new “pie” chart view for device energy consumption. Easily toggle between the traditional bar chart and this new visual representation by clicking the icon in the top-right corner. To maximize utility, this space on other energy cards now also displays the total energy for the selected period, offering immediate insights into your energy usage.

Seamless Updates: Progress Tracking for Home Assistant & Add-ons

Keeping track of updates for Home Assistant and its add-ons (managed by the Supervisor) is now more transparent. This release introduces progress tracking that details the downloading and unpacking stages. While progress may not always appear perfectly linear due to varying internet speeds and system loads, it provides a valuable estimate, reducing uncertainty during system updates on your self hosting server.

Expanding Your Open-Source Home Automation Ecosystem

The strength of Home Assistant lies in its vast and growing ecosystem of integrations. The community’s dedication continues to bring new devices and services under the umbrella of local control and open-source management.

Introducing a Host of New Integrations

Home Assistant 2025.11 welcomes a diverse array of new integrations, further expanding your control over various devices and services:

  • Actron Air: Control your Actron Air conditioning systems.
  • Sunricher DALI: Manage DALI-based lighting systems.
  • Fing: Network scanning, device detection, and presence monitoring via the Fing platform.
  • Firefly III: Integrate with this free, open-source home automation personal finance manager for transaction management, budgets, and reports.
  • iNELS: Manage lighting, heating, and automation components in your iNELS smart home.
  • Lunatone Gateway: Control DALI lighting systems through Lunatone’s DALI gateway.
  • Meteo.lt: Regional weather forecasts for locations in Lithuania.
  • Nintendo Parental Controls: Monitor and manage device usage and restrictions.
  • OpenRGB: Unified control of RGB lighting across various hardware brands.

Significant Improvements to Existing Integrations

Beyond new additions, many existing integrations have received noteworthy enhancements, deepening their functionality and improving your local control capabilities:

  • SwitchBot: Now supports garage door openers.
  • Habitica: Gained support for notifications.
  • VegeHub: New switch support to control actuators.
  • Portainer: Control and monitor containers with new switches, buttons, and sensors – excellent for those managing their home server management.
  • Volvo: Displays car location and offers control buttons.
  • ElevenLabs: Can now be used for speech-to-text.
  • UniFi network devices: Control supported LED indicators.
  • OctoPrint: Set 3D printer tool and bed temperatures, a boon for DIY enthusiasts.
  • Niko Home Control: Adds scenes into Home Assistant.
  • Control4: Supports climate devices like thermostats.
  • Growatt MIN/TLX inverters: Added control and grid charge options.
  • Telegram bot: Event entities for easier automation from messages.
  • Xbox: Now supports images for game display, avatar, and Gamerpic.
  • Victron Remote Monitoring: Added solar production forecasting for the energy dashboard.
  • Shelly: Supports climate and valve entities.
  • Reolink: Improved reporting for bicycles and specific types of people, vehicles, and animals.

Greater Accessibility: UI Setup for Integrations

Home Assistant continues its journey to make setup as accessible as possible. More integrations are moving from YAML-only configurations to direct setup via the user interface, broadening their appeal. The London Underground integration is now fully configurable via the Home Assistant UI, simplifying integration for all users.

Commitment to Quality: Integration Quality Scale Achievements

The integration quality scale is a testament to Home Assistant’s dedication to high standards. This release celebrates significant milestones:

  • Seven integrations reached platinum 🏆: APC UPS Daemon, IMGW-PIB, LG WebOS TV, Mealie, NextDNS, ntfy, and Volvo.
  • Four integrations reached silver 🥈: 1-wire, Ubiquiti airOS, LetPot, and Switcher.

These achievements reflect extensive testing, robust documentation, and dedicated maintenance, ensuring these integrations provide the best possible user experience and long-term reliability for your open-source home automation.

Farewell to Deprecated Integrations

To maintain a lean and functional system, some integrations have been removed due to deprecation or loss of external service:

  • Vultr: Removed due to API v1 shutdown in September 2023.
  • IBM Watson IoT Platform: Withdrawn and discontinued by IBM since September 2022.
  • Plum Lightpad: Non-functional due to server shutdown.

Optimizing Your Home Assistant Experience

Beyond headline features, Home Assistant 2025.11 includes numerous other refinements designed to make your daily use smoother and more efficient.

  • Group support for valves has been added by @thecode, allowing you to control multiple valves as one.
  • Searching in data tables is significantly improved, now supporting searches across multiple columns, thanks to @wendevlin.
  • Energy graphs now consistently display the total for the selected period in the top-right corner, a neat addition by @MindFreeze.
  • You can now use images from any integration providing images for your dashboard background, courtesy of @karwosts.

Critical Efficiency Boost: Improved Logging for Home Assistant OS

For users running Home Assistant Operating System, this release brings a significant improvement in logging efficiency. Previously, logs were stored twice: once by the OS itself (efficiently and persistently) and again in the Home Assistant configuration folder. This redundancy consumed double the disk space and, more critically, caused unnecessary wear on your storage medium.

As of 2025.11, Home Assistant will no longer write logs to the configuration folder. All logs can still be viewed and downloaded directly from the Home Assistant settings page, which now pulls data directly from the OS. For Raspberry Pi users or anyone running Home Assistant OS on an SD card or SSD, this update is a game-changer. Reduced disk writes mean extended life for your storage medium, a critical factor for the longevity and stability of your home server management setup.

Are you more into the command line? No worries, our Home Assistant CLI has you covered. Check it out by running ha core logs --help for more information.

Smarter & More Intuitive: The Evolving Home Dashboard

The Home Dashboard continues to get smarter and more intuitive. This release introduces further organizational improvements:

  • Suggested entities and favorites are now combined into a single, smart section for greater relevance.
  • Areas are now grouped by floor, providing a clearer overview of your home’s layout.
  • Dedicated Lights, Climate, and Security dashboards have been moved under Settings > Dashboards, and now include devices not assigned to specific areas, ensuring nothing is overlooked.

These improvements create a more natural and reflective representation of your home, making your smart home automation dashboard feel less like a setup and more like a true command center.

Ensuring Stability: Patch Releases and Community Support

The Home Assistant team is committed to stability. Patch releases for 2025.11 will be issued throughout November, primarily focusing on bug fixes to ensure a smooth experience. The first patch, 2025.11.1, released on November 7, already addresses several key issues.

Home Assistant thrives on its vibrant community. If you need assistance, wish to discuss features, or encounter any issues, don’t hesitate to join the community! Our active Discord chat server and forums are excellent places to connect. For bug reports, please use our issue tracker, and for updates directly to your inbox, sign up for the Open Home Foundation Newsletter, covering the latest in open-source home automation.

Navigating Backward-Incompatible Changes

While the team strives to minimize disruptions, some backward-incompatible changes are occasionally necessary for progress. These are always documented to facilitate a smooth transition for your self hosting environment. Key changes in this release include:

  • Group assumed state: Groups now have an assumed state of true if at least one child entity has an assumed state, providing a more accurate reflection of uncertainty.
  • Asuswrt: The last_time_reachable attribute has been removed; use last_changed instead.
  • LG webOS TV: Media player entities without an automation trigger to turn on will now be unavailable instead of off.
  • Mealie: Now requires Mealie version 2 or later.
  • Motion Blinds: Tilt positions have been corrected to align with Home Assistant standards (0 = closed, 100 = open); automations may need adjustment.
  • Mobile app: The person entity now consistently shows the zone’s friendly name, potentially affecting automations triggering on a person’s state.
  • Nederlandse Spoorwegen: Entity is now a timestamp, requiring automation updates.
  • Traccar Server: Requires re-authentication with a new API Token for enhanced security. Ensure you generate an API Token on your Traccar server and reconfigure the integration in Home Assistant.
  • Xbox: Account tier and Gold tenure sensors, along with In party and In multiplayer binary sensors, have been retired.

If you are a custom integration developer, keep an eye on the developer blog for detailed information on API changes and new features. For a comprehensive list of all modifications, consult the Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2025.11.

FAQ

Q1: How does Home Assistant 2025.11 significantly enhance smart home automation capabilities?

A1: This release introduces revolutionary features like the new target picker, offering unprecedented clarity and scalability when building automations. You can now visualize exactly which devices and areas your automations affect, simplifying complex setups. Furthermore, the redesigned dialog for adding triggers, conditions, and actions provides a cleaner, more intuitive workflow, laying the groundwork for even more advanced automation possibilities for your smart home automation projects.

Q2: What key improvements does this update bring for local control and system performance for self-hosted setups?

A2: For self-hosters prioritizing local control and system health, 2025.11 delivers crucial enhancements. A standout is the improved logging efficiency for Home Assistant OS, which significantly reduces disk wear and storage consumption – a vital benefit for systems running on SD cards or SSDs. Additionally, new dashboard customization options give you granular control over how entity names appear, ensuring your interface perfectly reflects your local control setup.

Q3: What should I be aware of regarding backward-incompatible changes in Home Assistant 2025.11 for my open-source home automation?

A3: While the team strives for seamless updates, some backward-incompatible changes are necessary for progress. This release includes adjustments to group assumed states, LG webOS TV states, and a mandatory re-authentication for the Traccar integration, moving to a more secure API Token. Always review the “Backward-Incompatible Changes” section in the release notes to ensure your existing open-source home automation scripts and configurations are updated accordingly, preventing unexpected disruptions. Unique tip: If you manage your Home Assistant configuration in version control (like Git), consider creating a temporary branch before updating, allowing you to easily roll back or compare changes if issues arise.



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