Home Assistant 2026.11: HACS Becomes the Built-In Marketplace — What Changes and What to Check First

Home Assistant 2026.11: HACS Becomes the Built-In Marketplace — What Changes and What to Check First

Home Assistant 2026.11 (beta released 2026-10-28, stable expected Wednesday 2026-11-04) makes the biggest change to the platform's community ecosystem in years: HACS — the Home Assistant Community Store — is now built directly into Home Assistant as the Marketplace, found under Settings > Marketplace. If you've ever installed HACS to get a custom dashboard card, a theme, or a community integration, this release changes where that lives — but the goal, per Home Assistant lead Franck Nijhof, is that upgrading feels like nothing happened except the name change.

Note: this guide is based on the 2026.11 beta notes, which are a work in progress. A couple of details may shift before the stable release — the core Marketplace change is confirmed by the Home Assistant team and the HACS maintainers.

What the Marketplace is

• HACS, built in. The Marketplace is HACS ported into Home Assistant itself — same community integrations, dashboard cards, themes, and templates, now under Settings > Marketplace (admins only), set up by default. No separate install, and it works on every install type: Home Assistant OS, Container, and Core.
• Automatic migration. When you upgrade, your existing HACS downloads move to the Marketplace on their own: integrations, cards, themes, and updates stay in place, and update entities keep their IDs. Your old HACS install is cleaned up for you.
• Standalone HACS is retired. HACS can't be installed separately on 2026.11 or newer, and the old HACS won't get new releases. Once you update, the Marketplace is simply part of Home Assistant.

What to check before you update

• Read the release notes on entity names. 2026.11 changes how entity names are composed — this is listed as backward-incompatible, so check it before updating rather than after.
• Dashboard resources in YAML. If you define dashboard resources (custom cards) in YAML, verify them against the migration notes.
• Templates referencing HACS. Templates that call integration_entities('hacs') need attention, since the integration is now named differently.
• Custom repositories. Custom repos without a hacs.json file may not carry over cleanly — check the Marketplace documentation's "Coming from HACS" section.

Also in 2026.11

• Matter 1.5 cameras. Support for cameras over Matter 1.5, plus a Labs preview of two-way audio through cameras.
• Local backups and media storage. You can now keep backups and media on an internal or USB drive attached to your Home Assistant machine.
• Nest Pub/Sub migration. Google stops publishing Nest events to Google-hosted Pub/Sub topics on 2026-11-30. 2026.11 adds a Reconfigure flow and Repairs so you can point the Nest integration at your own topic without removing it — entity IDs and automations stay intact.

Why this matters for wall dashboards

A wall-mounted Home Assistant dashboard is where your cards live — and the Marketplace is where cards come from. With the store built into Settings, every community card and theme is one tap away on the same tablet you walk past every day, and updates arrive with your regular Home Assistant upgrades.

That tablet reads best as part of the wall rather than a device hung on it. Our universal low-profile flush tablet mount ($24.95 CAD, made in Canada) holds tablets 7" and up tight against the wall — landscape, for dashboards — and slides off the top for charging or quick access. For the full build, see our Home Assistant wall tablet build log (NFC, Qi, Fully Kiosk) and the dashboard tablet mount guide.

Sources

• Franck Nijhof (Home Assistant lead): "HACS is now the Home Assistant Marketplace" — frenck.dev
• HACS documentation: "HACS and the Marketplace" — hacs.xyz
• Home Assistant 2026.11 beta (2026.11.0b0), GitHub release 2026-10-28
• Local Smart Home Guide: "HACS becomes the Home Assistant Marketplace in 2026.11" — localsmarthomeguide.com