How I Added Home Assistant Without Ripping Out My Hubitat

In our first house, the one my wife and I bought first, I put together a patchwork system. It worked, but it needed a lot of maintenance.

When we built our current house, I wanted a system that worked across Apple Home and Alexa but also had local control. I consider Philips Hue and Lutron Caséta the gold standard for bulbs and switches. I already had Hubitat, so I used it to bring in lamps with unique bulbs and other devices and share them to HomeKit and Alexa.

I didn’t install the switches until after we moved in. I put motion switches in the closets and the pantry. There’s also a sensor on the stairs that turns all the lights on at night, so one of my kids who sleepwalks won’t trip.

I chose Home Assistant to tie my hodgepodge together. I didn’t tear anything down. Home Assistant went in on top, and Hubitat is still there.

Connecting Hubitat to Home Assistant

Two pieces connect them. Maker API is a built-in Hubitat app where you tick which devices it shares. The Hubitat integration is a community project for Home Assistant, installed through HACS, that turns those shared devices into entities.

1. In Hubitat, add a Maker API instance and tick the devices you want Home Assistant to see. Note the app ID (the number after /apps/api/ in its URLs) and the access token.
2. In Home Assistant, install the Hubitat integration through HACS and restart. Add it under Settings > Devices & services with the hub’s address, the app ID, and the token.
3. When you share more devices later, reload the integration so they show up.

If devices show up but their states never change, Hubitat probably can’t send events back to Home Assistant. This comes up a lot when Home Assistant runs in Docker. The “event server” section of the integration’s README covers it.

Community integrations can break after an update, so read the release notes before updating. HACS is planned to become a built-in “Marketplace” in Home Assistant 2026.11, so these steps may change a little.

Hue and Caséta have built-in Home Assistant integrations, so you can connect those directly instead of going through Hubitat. Two built-in helpers are also worth setting up, under Settings > Devices & services > Helpers: a light group per room, and Switch as X so a lamp on a smart plug shows up as a light instead of a switch.

Pick one system to own each automation. Two systems automating the same light will fight.

Stairs lights example

The stairs idea works on any platform: a motion sensor where the path starts, a night-only condition, and lights along the path. Here’s an example in Home Assistant. It isn’t a copy of my setup, and your entity names will be different.

# EXAMPLE: at night, motion on the stairs turns the path lights on
alias: "Night: stairs path lights"
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.stairs_motion
    to: "on"
conditions:
  - condition: time
    after: "21:00:00"
    before: "06:30:00"
actions:
  - action: light.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id:
        - light.stairs
        - light.hallway
        - light.kitchen
    data:
      brightness_pct: 100
mode: single

A fast motion sensor matters here. Go full brightness with no fade, and decide whether the lights stay on until morning or turn off after no motion for a while.

Locks

Some of my HomeKit locks won’t connect to Home Assistant. I haven’t solved that yet. If you’re buying a lock, check how it would connect to Home Assistant first.