Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, and Home Assistant: How They Fit Together
My real goal is for everything to be available where I use it. My phone, my voice assistants, and dashboards. Behind the scenes can get messy, but I try to stay as low maintenance as possible.
In my house that means Apple Home and Alexa every day, Hubitat sharing devices to both, and Home Assistant tying it together with dashboards. I don’t use Google Home, so that part of this post is from the docs, not experience.
Most people have an iPhone, so Apple Home is easy to use and integrate, but the hub devices are much more expensive. Alexa is much cheaper and easier to put multiple of throughout your home. Think of it as a whole home speaker system you can talk to.
What each one is
Alexa is Amazon’s voice assistant and app. Most device control goes through Amazon’s cloud. Some Echo devices are also Matter controllers and Thread border routers, so Matter devices can be controlled locally. You need at least one Matter-capable Echo for Matter.
Apple Home (HomeKit) is Apple’s app and Siri. A home hub (HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV) runs automations, keeps track of devices, and gives you remote access. You need one to add Matter accessories, and Thread devices need a Thread-capable hub. Apple’s old Home architecture stopped being supported in February 2026, so everyone is on the new one now.
Google Home is Google’s app and Assistant. Like the others, it needs a Google hub (a Nest speaker, Nest Hub, Google TV Streamer, or similar) for Matter, and a hub with a Thread border router for Thread devices. Google’s docs also call for IPv6 on your network.
Home Assistant is software you run yourself on a Pi, a mini PC, or their Green box. It talks to most devices locally and doesn’t need a cloud account. It isn’t a voice assistant out of the box the way the other three are. It’s more of the place everything shows up.
Matter is the standard all four support for adding devices. Thread is one of the low-power networks Matter devices can use, and it needs a border router, which is usually built into one of the hubs above. Matter devices can be shared with more than one of these at a time. Not every device type is supported by every app yet, so check before you buy.
Getting Home Assistant devices into the others
HomeKit Bridge is built into Home Assistant. It publishes Home Assistant entities to Apple Home so they work in the Home app and with Siri, even if the device doesn’t support HomeKit. It’s local. Each bridge holds up to 150 accessories, and locks, cameras, and TVs need to go in their own accessory-mode instance. If you run Home Assistant in Docker, use host networking or pairing may not find the bridge.
For Alexa and Google, there’s a manual route. For Alexa you build your own Smart Home Skill with an Amazon developer account and AWS, and Home Assistant has to be reachable from the internet. Google’s manual setup is similar. I skip all of that and share devices to Alexa through Hubitat.
There’s also a community project, Home Assistant Matter Hub, that exposes Home Assistant entities as a Matter bridge that Apple Home, Alexa, and Google Home can pair with locally. It’s a community add-on, not part of Home Assistant itself. Alexa needs a Matter-capable Echo for it and seems to limit a bridge to around 80 to 100 devices.
Hubitat in the middle
This is what I do. Hubitat has a built-in HomeKit Bridge app and an Amazon Echo Skill. You pick which devices to share, and they show up in Apple Home and Alexa. Both are one-way from Hubitat out. Hubitat’s docs suggest sharing one or two devices first, checking they work, then adding the rest. Home Assistant then reads Hubitat too, so the same devices end up on my dashboards.
If you’re buying Hubitat for this, here’s the Hubitat Elevation hub.