Home Assistant vs Nexum — When Each One Wins (Honest)

Both are local-first. Both keep your data on your hardware. They're not competitors so much as different shapes of the same idea.

By Ludwig Taveras Perdomo, Luddan Services LLC · 2026-05-20 · 9-minute read

If you've gotten this far in your search for a home automation platform, you've probably already ruled out the cloud-only big four (Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings, Apple Home). You want your house to keep working when AWS has a bad day, and you'd rather not pay a per-device subscription to use hardware you already own.

That narrows the field to two real options people compare: Home Assistant — the open-source juggernaut running in 2+ million households — and Nexum, what we (Luddan Services LLC) make. This post is the honest comparison.

The TL;DR up front: if you only care about home automation, you're comfortable in Linux, and you're willing to invest 10–30 hours learning a new platform, Home Assistant is the right pick. It's free, brilliant, and has a 21,000-strong community. We use it ourselves for some integrations.

Nexum makes sense if you fit at least one of these:

• You also run a business and want POS + CRM + accounting on the same appliance that controls your house.
• You want a turnkey appliance, not a 30-hour weekend project.
• You'd rather pay a small monthly fee than maintain a system yourself.
• You want one bill instead of stitching three subscriptions together.

Let's get into specifics.

What they have in common

The shared DNA is significant:

• Local-first. Both keep your data on hardware you own. Both work when the internet is down. Both refuse to phone home for routine operation.
• No subscription tax on hardware. Buy a sensor once; it works forever. Neither Home Assistant nor Nexum charges per-device fees to keep your gear working.
• Vendor-neutral. Both support 1,000+ device brands without vendor lock-in. Both speak the open Matter standard.
• No camera/voice mining. Neither platform sends your camera feeds or voice commands to a cloud for analysis. Local-only AI is the default.

If you only need home automation, the rest of this post is mostly an academic comparison. Home Assistant is free, mature, and excellent. Stop reading and go install it.

Where Home Assistant wins

1. The integration library is unmatched

3,400+ official integrations. If your device has ever been on the internet, someone has written a Home Assistant integration for it. We've contributed to a couple ourselves. Nexum supports about 30 device families as of mid-2026; we're growing, but we won't catch up to that breadth this decade.

2. Free

$0/mo, forever, if you can run it on hardware you already own. We charge for modules ($5–$49/mo each). For pure home automation, the math heavily favors Home Assistant.

3. Community + extensibility

If you want to tinker, Home Assistant is the platform. Custom Python automations, custom dashboards (Lovelace), HACS for community add-ons, native scripting in YAML. The community is enormous and welcoming. Want to build a custom integration to your specific brand of pellet stove? Home Assistant is the place.

4. Maturity

HA has been shipping since 2013. It's survived multiple architectural rewrites and emerged stronger. Nexum is newer; we don't pretend otherwise.

Where Nexum wins

1. Business modules on the same appliance

This is the gap we noticed and built into. Home Assistant doesn't ship a Point of Sale module, a CRM, an accounting ledger, or an invoice generator. Plugins exist for some of these, but none are first-class citizens; you'd be stitching three open-source projects together and praying they don't conflict.

Nexum does. POS+CRM ($49/mo), Accounting ($29/mo), and Fleet Management ($39/mo) live as native modules on the same appliance that runs your smart-home rules. One backup, one upgrade cycle, one place to look when something's off.

For a coffee shop, a contracting business, or a household with a side hustle, this is the difference between "I have a smart home AND a separate POS subscription" vs "everything is on one box in the back office."

2. Turnkey hardware

Home Assistant has Home Assistant Green and Yellow — pre-imaged appliances they sell. We applaud those. But the rest of the time, HA assumes you'll flash an SD card, configure a Raspberry Pi, deal with backup tooling, etc. The first weekend with HA is real work.

Nexum ships a single-command installer. curl -sL https://luddansvcs.com/install.sh | bash on any Ubuntu mini PC and you're 10 minutes from a dashboard. We also offer pre-imaged appliances starting at $449 one-time if you don't want to provide the hardware.

3. We do the maintenance, you keep the data

HA is community-maintained — that's what makes it free, and also what means a botched release every six months breaks something for some users. Nexum is a managed product: we test releases against a synthetic fleet of 200 simulated units before they ship, and we own the bug if it breaks. Your data is on YOUR hardware either way; what we own is the runtime quality.

4. One bill, one vendor

If you're running a small business, the math of "Square POS + Quickbooks Self-Employed + Home Assistant + a separate password manager + something for email triage" stacks up to $80–200/mo and four separate vendor relationships. Nexum's à-la-carte modules can replace most of that for $40–80/mo, with one vendor.

5. Offline mode is explicit, not implied

Home Assistant works offline, but the UX doesn't explicitly call it out. If your internet drops, you have to know your dashboard is still reachable on your LAN. Nexum shows a yellow banner the second connectivity is lost — "Working offline. POS, accounting, smart home, security, vault, finance: all working as normal. External events queued for sync." — and a green "✓ Works offline" badge on every module card. Same underlying reality; clearer communication.

The honest decision matrix

Can I run both?

Yes. People do. Run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi for deep device control, and let Nexum handle the business modules + the household-level dashboard. They don't conflict — both are local-first, both speak HTTP+MQTT, and you can mirror device states between them with a small bridge. We've written one for Bambu Lab printers; we can do more if there's demand.

The pitch (yes, this is the pitch)

If you read the comparison above and concluded "I'd want Nexum if I had a business angle but I don't" — that's the right read. Don't buy us out of guilt or curiosity. Buy us if any of these are true for you:

• You run a shop and the POS subscription tax annoys you every month.
• You want a smart home but you don't want to learn Linux.
• You're a small business that wants accounting + CRM + smart home + email AI on one box.
• You want to support a US-based one-person shop building this in Florida.

If none of those fit, go install Home Assistant. It's brilliant. We've learned from it.

Questions? Drop us a note. We do free 30-minute fit calls. No sales script — we'll tell you if Home Assistant is the better answer for your situation.