Arlo Pro SmartHub vs Home Assistant Green

Home Assistant Green wins overall. It is a real smart home hub that unifies hundreds of brands locally, integrates with HomeKit, Google Home, Alexa and SmartThings, and offers ONVIF, RTSP, Node-RED and Tailscale. The Arlo Pro SmartHub is cheaper and has Wi-Fi, but it only supports Arlo cameras.

Openness. Home Assistant Green runs the Home Assistant platform, so it talks to devices from hundreds of manufacturers and keeps automations local and private. The Arlo Pro SmartHub is a closed camera base station with no smart home protocols and no third-party device support.

Not out of the box. Home Assistant Green needs the separate Connect ZBT-1 dongle to act as a Zigbee coordinator, a Thread border router or a Matter-over-Thread bridge. It is also Ethernet only, with no built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, so plan for a network cable and a USB radio.

Yes, and more openly than the Arlo hub. Home Assistant Green supports ONVIF and RTSP, so it can pull in standards-based cameras from many brands and record or automate on them locally. The Arlo Pro SmartHub only works with Arlo cameras, and Arlo's own event recording still requires a subscription.

Buy Home Assistant Green if you want local control, privacy and one dashboard across brands, and you are willing to climb the Home Assistant learning curve. It is silent, tiny and ready to run, and it opens up Node-RED, Tailscale and a huge add-on community, though remote access usually wants a Home Assistant Cloud subscription.

Buy the Arlo Pro SmartHub only if you own Arlo cameras and want the faster response, longer range, 2K live streaming and local USB recording it enables. It offers Wi-Fi as well as Ethernet, which Home Assistant Green does not, but it cannot control any other kind of smart home device.