Home Assistant folds HACS into its core and renames it Marketplace
From version 2026.11, the HACS community store ships natively inside Home Assistant as the Marketplace, with automatic migration and no more manual install. Third-party code still runs with full access to your home, though: the upgrade does not remove the supply-chain risk.
October 26, 2026. Franck Nijhof, better known as Frenck, confirms what contributors had spotted in the public code for a few weeks: HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, will ship natively inside Home Assistant starting with version 2026.11, under the name Marketplace. November 2026. The switch is imminent. The most-installed app store in self-hosting becomes an official component — with one consequence few people have measured: the third-party risk does not disappear, it moves.
HACS, the extension that outgrew the core
To grasp the scope of the announcement, you have to measure what HACS is. Created by Joakim, known as ludeeus, the community store lets you install integrations, dashboard cards and themes that are not part of Home Assistant. Frenck sums it up in one line: there are more integrations and cards in HACS than Home Assistant ships natively.
About a year and a half ago, Joakim donated the project to the Open Home Foundation, the structure that now carries the ecosystem. That donation made the absorption possible. For Frenck, the decision was obvious: a component used by nearly the entire community deserved to be maintained like the rest of the core, rather than left on the side.
The historical friction was installation. On a Container install, setting up HACS was a manual ritual: download a zip, unpack it into the right folder, restart, hope. By building it in, Home Assistant removes that step for every install method — Home Assistant OS, Container, it does not matter.
What concretely changes in 2026.11
Frenck’s promise fits one sentence: “When you upgrade, it should feel like nothing happened. Except the name changed.” The migration is automatic. Home Assistant moves your data over, cleans up your old HACS install, and your integrations, cards and updates are there, as before.
The new Marketplace lives under Settings → Marketplace. Installing an integration is simpler: previously you opened HACS, downloaded the integration, restarted, then searched for it again under “Devices and services.” Now you search in the Marketplace, click Install, and land straight in the setup flow. A few seconds later you are done — no restart for a new install.
Updating an integration still requires a restart, for reasons tied to Python and how Home Assistant loads its code today. An integration’s page also gains useful metrics: install count, GitHub stars, open issues — enough to gauge a project before installing it.
# Container: upgrade to 2026.11 to get the Marketplace
docker compose pull homeassistant
docker compose up -dOne point deserves attention: on 2026.11 and later, Home Assistant prevents installing HACS separately, to avoid conflicts. The old HACS will get no more releases; its successor ships with Home Assistant itself, and every upgrade brings the latest Marketplace.
The third-party risk does not go away — it is now explicit
This is the most interesting part of the announcement, and the least commented. Folding HACS into the core does not make it safer: what lives there is still third-party code running with full access to your home, your data and your system. Frenck is direct on this, and the team chose to say it rather than hide it.
Opening the Marketplace for the first time shows a warning screen: everything is made by the community, nothing is tested or supported by the Home Assistant project, and harm to privacy, security or stability is possible. The user must tick “I understand the risks” before continuing.
That is a notable posture shift. Before, the risk of HACS was implicit: nobody reminded you at install time. Now it is stated in plain terms, on first launch. For a self-hoster, the message is clear: the Marketplace is not a verified app store; it is a simplified gateway to unaudited community code — the same trust model as before, but with an explicit guardrail.
The supply chain is the real subject. A popular Marketplace integration that gets compromised, or a maintainer who hands over their repository, would give an attacker a direct path into tens of thousands of homes. Folding it into the core changes none of that exposure; it may even widen it, by lowering the install cost for less technical users who never read the issues or the code.
The only structural improvement is informational: install counts, stars and open-issue counts now sit on the integration page itself, giving users a thin but real signal about a project’s health before they click Install.
Why “Marketplace” and not “Store”
The name is not a marketing detail. The team explicitly rejected “Store,” which evokes the Google Play Store or the App Store — places where you buy things. “Marketplace” evokes the neighborhood market, a place of community exchange with no monetary transaction. Nothing costs money, and nothing will start costing money because of this change.
The name also leaves a door open for the future. Frenck floats ideas — not plans — such as official integrations appearing in the Marketplace, or core integrations moving out to the Marketplace for updates independent of Home Assistant’s release cycle. If the store no longer holds only community content, the word “Community” stops making sense.
The move also quietly ends a long-running friction: version drift. Because HACS was a separate add-on, its supported version range could lag behind a freshly updated Home Assistant, leaving integrations temporarily incompatible after every release. By shipping the Marketplace with Home Assistant itself, that drift disappears — the store and the platform now move on the same release train, and every upgrade carries the matching version. It is a small operational win that only people who have nursed a HACS install through a major upgrade will fully appreciate, and it is exactly the kind of invisible improvement Frenck describes as the boring part he is proudest of.
What this says about self-hosting’s maturity
The absorption of HACS is a milestone for the ecosystem. It enshrines the community-store model as base infrastructure, on the same level as a distribution’s package manager. It is also a signal to other projects: Home Assistant shows that folding in a massively adopted third-party component can happen without breakage, provided migration and communication are handled well.
The trade-off is greater responsibility for the Open Home Foundation. By becoming official, the Marketplace puts the project’s reputation on the line. The warning screen is the concrete expression of that tension: integrating means exposing, and exposing means warning.
For the user, the switch is seamless but not trivial. Automatic migration saves time; the end of manual install widens access; the first-run warning reminds you that trust remains, by construction, distributed and unverified.
Verdict
Upgrade to 2026.11 without hesitation: the migration is automatic, you lose no integrations, and you gain a cleaner install flow plus an explicit guardrail on first launch. Do not remove your old HACS install by hand: Home Assistant does it for you. And above all, do not read the core integration as a seal of approval: what you install from the Marketplace is still third-party code running with full access to your home. Check popularity, stars and issues before installing, exactly as you did with HACS — the core integration does not replace judgment, it only makes it more accessible.