What this is about
For one Home Assistant instance, a browser tab on the home network plus maybe a Nabu Casa subscription gets the job done. The moment a second install joins — yours plus your parents’, then the holiday house, then the first paying customers as a side gig — the overview collapses. Suddenly you want remote access to five, ten, fifty HA instances. A quick status glance. A maintenance log that isn’t held together by memory and a sticky note.
Six approaches people actually use in practice — from free off-the-shelf tools to specialist platforms. Honest, no marketing gloss.
Criteria
Before the options: what can you reasonably measure a multi-instance tool against?
- Multi-tenancy — can I manage installs belonging to different customers cleanly separated?
- Monitoring vs. plain access — do I see proactively that an instance is unhappy, or only when I go and look?
- CGNAT readiness — does it survive Carrier-Grade NAT (more and more the default on fibre and mobile)?
- Privacy and GDPR — who has technical access, and when? Is that auditable?
- Setup effort per new instance — five minutes, or five hours?
- Running cost — per instance, or flat?
1. Nabu Casa Home Assistant Cloud
The official cloud service from the HA Foundation. 6.50 USD a month per instance, one click to install from the HA UI, done.
The trust level is hard to beat — not a third party, the Foundation itself. Alexa and Google voice integration come along, setup runs under two minutes, and revenue flows straight back into HA development. Good reason to support the service when your use case fits.
The catch is single-tenancy. There’s no dashboard where fifteen instances sit side by side. Each one is its own cloud subscription with its own login. No central monitoring of CPU, RAM, logs or plugin versions. For one installation, ideal. For a portfolio, not what it was built for.
2. Tailscale (or WireGuard)
Mesh VPN, and over the last few years the de facto standard in the technical HA scene. Free up to three users and a hundred devices, tiered above that.
Zero-config experience, CGNAT-friendly via DERP relays, cross-platform, very dependable in practice. Already arrived in home networks. No port forwarding required.
But: pure tunnelling. No monitoring, no dashboard, no state tracking. From the integrator’s seat the actual sting is something else — Tailscale grants full network access, not just to the HA device. A customer on your tailnet is potentially on their own printer, NAS and baby monitor. A bigger trust step at the customer side than the use case actually calls for, and not a comfortable thing to have to explain.
3. Cloudflare Tunnel
Persistent outbound tunnel from the HA install to Cloudflare. The frontend becomes reachable via a *.example.com subdomain. Free at small scale.
No port forwarding, CGNAT-friendly, free TLS certificates, the kind of edge infrastructure that doesn’t fall over. A solid fit if you want a single customer’s HA frontend publicly reachable, with Cloudflare Access in front as the auth layer.
Two caveats. Again, one configuration per setup — ten customers means ten separate islands of config to maintain. And the traffic flows over US infrastructure, which gets awkward to explain under GDPR when you roll it out at customer sites.
4. Remote-RED
HA custom integration built specifically for mobile remote access. 10 USD a year — almost a giveaway.
HA-specific, established, dedicated mobile app, ridiculously cheap. For hobbyists who want to reach their own HA from the road, a pragmatic pick.
For B2B, too narrowly cut. Frontend access only, no backend. Single user. No dashboard, no monitoring. If the only HA install you ever want to see is your own, fine. Otherwise, not the tool.
5. Domotz
Hardware-agnostic network RMM, used mostly by AV and IT integrators. 1.50 USD per monitored device per month.
Strong networking toolkit (topology mapping, SNMP, bandwidth tracking), PSA integrations into Zendesk and IT Glue, multi-tenancy designed in for integrators. If you already look after a mixed smart-home portfolio (Control4, Crestron, Lutron, networking gear), there’s a lot to like.
For an HA-only portfolio Domotz is the wrong tool though. It sees Home Assistant as “one server among many”. No HA integrations, no HACS plugins, no automation counts, no HA-specific logs. Using it for an HA portfolio is like using your lane-keep assist to avoid parking dings — it’ll sort of work, but the tool was built for something else.
6. HA Fleet Manager
Specialist B2B platform for Home Assistant integrators. Self-hosted relay architecture (Hetzner, GDPR-aligned), a connector running as an HA custom integration on every instance, a central dashboard.
HA-specific state monitoring (integrations, HACS plugins, automation counts, critical logs), multi-tenancy from day one, customer-controlled consent toggle with a 12-hour maintenance window, CGNAT-friendly via WebSocket outbound relay, device-only access without a full-LAN VPN, DACH hosting, German UI.
Young product. Smaller feature surface than established RMM tools, no PSA integrations yet, no first-party mobile app in the MVP. Overkill for a pure single-user setup — the value kicks in from around five installations upwards.
Side by side
| Criterion | Nabu Casa | Tailscale | CF Tunnel | Remote-RED | Domotz | HA Fleet Manager |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-tenant dashboard | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| HA-specific monitoring | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Customer consent toggle | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| CGNAT-friendly | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | (✅) | ✅ |
| Device-only access (no LAN VPN) | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| EU / DACH hosting | (✅) | (✅) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Setup per instance | < 2 min | 5 min | 15 min | 5 min | 10 min | 5 min |
| Price per instance / month | $6.50 | $0–8 | $0 | $0.83 | $1.50/device | TBA (target: €5–9) |
Legend: ✅ supported · (✅) partial · ❌ not supported.
Decision tree
A rule of thumb that holds up in practice:
One HA installation, personal use? → Nabu Casa. Done.
One HA installation, technically deep, you want full control? → Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale, pick by taste.
2–5 installations (family, friends, holiday house), you’re the “house admin”? → Tailscale with per-site tags usually does it.
5+ installations, at least a few of them paying customers? → A specialist platform like HA Fleet Manager. Otherwise the overview slips, and maintenance work can’t be documented cleanly.
Mixed portfolio (HA + Control4 + Crestron + networking)? → Domotz as the foundation, HA Fleet Manager as the HA-specific layer on top. They don’t get in each other’s way.
What’s left
There’s no single right tool. There’s a right tool for a given scale and a given relationship to the installations you look after. For your own use, generic tools take you a long way. With a growing customer portfolio, the moment comes when the tool shapes the work — and at that moment a generic VPN without a dashboard, without monitoring, without a consent workflow starts costing you scale, well before it actually hurts.
HA Fleet Manager is built for exactly that transition. From “I have access to everything” to “I can professionally look after a portfolio without trading away trust.”
Disclosure: HA Fleet Manager is the product behind this blog. The comparison is still meant honestly — where another tool fits better, it gets named.