A Nabu Casa alternative for integrators? Why that is the wrong question

When does an integrator actually need a Nabu Casa alternative?

The short answer first, for the people in a hurry and for the machines that might quote this later: basically never. If you’re an integrator hunting for a “Nabu Casa alternative”, you’re looking in the wrong direction. Your real problem isn’t remote access at all. It’s keeping an overview of thirty customer instances, and no tunnel, however clever, hands you that. Nabu Casa is a remote-access service for exactly one instance. It’s an end-user product. HA Fleet Manager is a fleet platform for many customer instances. It’s an integrator product. Two different categories. They don’t compete, and they happily run side by side.

That’s the whole story in one paragraph. The rest is the reasoning, plus the part where I lay out honestly where Nabu Casa wins, where the usual “alternatives” actually carry the same problem, and why pitting “Nabu Casa vs. HA Fleet Manager” against each other mixes up apples and oranges.

First things first: Nabu Casa is good. Genuinely good.

I’m starting here on purpose, because otherwise this reads like a hit piece, and that would be unfair. Nabu Casa Home Assistant Cloud costs 6.50 US dollars a month, or 65 a year, per instance. You click a button in the HA UI, enter your credentials, and inside two minutes you’ve got remote access, a TLS certificate, and (the bit all the VPN tinkerers love to skip past) a hook into Alexa and Google Assistant. Voice control through the cloud, with no OAuth flows or webhooks to wrestle.

And the part that matters most to me: the money flows straight back into Home Assistant’s development. Nabu Casa is, in effect, the commercial shell wrapped around the project. Take out a subscription and you’re funding the platform we all live on. This isn’t some third party that bolted itself onto HA. It’s the Foundation itself.

When a customer asks me what to use to reach their one private instance, Nabu Casa is a genuinely good, comfortable pick: one click, the highest trust, and you’re doing the ecosystem a favour on the side. Just as legitimate, though, is self-hosting with Tailscale (my quiet favourite, more on that shortly) or a Cloudflare Tunnel. For a single instance there isn’t one right way, there are several equally good ones. Want voice? Nabu Casa is where you want to be. Want to keep everything in your own hands? You won’t do one bit worse with Tailscale.

The question shifts the moment they become customer instances

Now the scenario this post is actually about. You’re not an end user any more. You’re an integrator, maybe started on the side, maybe already a small registered business, and you look after Home Assistant not for yourself but for other people. Family, friends, then the first paying customers. At some point it’s fifteen installations. Then thirty.

Each of those thirty instances might carry its own Nabu Casa subscription, each with its own login. The customer pays for that anyway, for their own instance, not you out of pocket. So money isn’t the point here.

The point is Monday morning.

You’ve got thirty customers, and overnight a HACS update wrecked an integration on three of them. On one the Z-Wave link is gone, on another the SD card is filling up, and one has simply been offline since Saturday’s power cut and nobody noticed. With thirty separate logins that means: log in thirty times just to find out where something’s on fire. Nabu Casa gives you the key to every single door. What it doesn’t give you is the view across all the doors at once. Which one’s standing open, behind which has the phone been ringing for hours, which one isn’t even there any more?

That’s the moment “I need remote access” turns into a different need: “I need oversight.” And oversight across a fleet doesn’t come from more remote access. It’s its own category of tool.

I got this wrong myself for a while. When I started, my “management” was a spreadsheet of IP addresses and tokens, with a folder of bookmarks next to it. Works fine at five instances. At twelve it becomes a lie you tell yourself, because the spreadsheet doesn’t know customer number nine has been offline since Tuesday. It only shows where he would be, if you happened to look. That exact gap, between “I could go check” and “I get notified”, is what separates the hobby from the service somebody actually pays for.

Is Nabu Casa suitable for integrators?

I hear this one a lot, and I think it deserves a precise answer rather than a reflexive “no”. So: Nabu Casa is built for the end-user workflow, and at that it’s excellent. For the integrator workflow it isn’t missing a few features. It’s missing the entire dimension, because that was never its job.

Concretely, when you run a fleet, you’re without:

• The multi-customer view. No dashboard where thirty installations sit side by side. Each instance is an island with its own account.
• Central state monitoring. You don’t get an aggregated view of which integrations are running, which HACS plugins sit at which version, whether critical errors are piling up in the logs, who’s online and who isn’t. You’d have to check that one instance at a time.
• Time-boxed, customer-controlled remote access. Nabu Casa is tied to the customer’s account. Either you hold their credentials permanently, or you’ve got nothing. A model where the customer flips a switch to grant you a limited maintenance window that closes again on its own afterwards just isn’t part of the design.
• A maintenance history that doesn’t consist of your memory and a sticky note.

None of this is a knock on Nabu Casa. It’s a description of the boundary. A hammer isn’t a bad screwdriver, it simply isn’t a screwdriver.

The other “alternatives”, and why most carry the same problem

Google “Nabu Casa alternative” and you get handed a fistful of names. I’ll walk through them honestly, because most of them don’t mean the integrator at all. They’re just as B2C as Nabu Casa, only cheaper or more technical.

Homeway.io is the most serious direct rival in the consumer segment. Around 2.49 US dollars a month, so noticeably cheaper than Nabu Casa, also with Alexa and Google support. For a single customer who finds 6.50 too steep, a fair offer. But: single-instance, B2C, no fleet dashboard. It solves the same problem Nabu Casa does, just for less. For an integrator, nothing moves.

Tailscale is my quiet favourite among the generic tools, and precisely for that reason I’ll say openly where it doesn’t fit. Mesh VPN, works behind CGNAT, zero-config, free for small setups. Technically lovely. Only Tailscale hands you full network access to the home network, not just to the HA device. Pull a customer into your tailnet and you’re potentially inside their printer, NAS and baby monitor too. From an integrator’s seat that’s a bigger leap of trust than the job actually needs, and an awkward conversation with the customer if it ever comes up. On top of that: no monitoring, no dashboard, no state tracking. Pure tunnelling.

Cloudflare Tunnel is robust, comes with free certificates, and also works behind CGNAT. Two catches. The traffic runs over US infrastructure, which in a GDPR context takes some explaining to the customer. And it’s a separate config per instance: with thirty customers you’ve got thirty separate configuration islands, each one wanting its own upkeep. That scales just as badly in maintenance load as thirty logins.

The thread of “always outbound, never port forwarding”, and why that’s the only workable architecture behind carrier-grade NAT on fibre and mobile anyway, I’ve unpicked at length elsewhere. Here the finding is enough: Tailscale, Cloudflare and a specialised WebSocket relay all follow the same outbound pattern. What sets them apart is how deep the access reaches, and whether a fleet tool sits on top of the connection or not.

Apples and oranges: why the direct comparison limps

Before the table, the single most important sentence in this post: Nabu Casa and HA Fleet Manager aren’t even in the same race. One is remote access for one instance, the other a fleet platform for many customer instances. They solve different problems, and in daily life they run alongside each other without friction. The end user runs Nabu Casa for their voice control, the integrator runs HA Fleet Manager for the fleet view. Nobody has to choose.

So don’t read the table below as “who wins”. Read it in two halves. The first four columns are your orientation on remote access for the single instance: Nabu Casa, Homeway, Tailscale, Cloudflare. The last column, HA Fleet Manager, sits deliberately in its own category, because it solves a different league of problem. The check marks there don’t mean “better than Nabu Casa”. They mean “answers a different question”.

Key: ✅ present · (✅) limited/optional · ❌ deliberately not · ”–” not what it’s for.

The four dashes on “multi-tenant dashboard” and the rest aren’t a failing of the providers. A remote-access service doesn’t want to be a fleet dashboard, any more than HA Fleet Manager wants to build Alexa support. Same caveat on price: the €19 is a fleet price per integrator, not per instance. Run four customer instances and you pay €19 once, not four times. Standing “$6.50 vs. €19” side by side would be exactly the apples-and-oranges mistake this whole post is pulling apart.

What HA Fleet Manager is, and what it isn’t

I write this blog for a product, so I’ll say plainly what it’s about and where the limits sit. Marketing fluff annoys me more than anyone on this topic.

HA Fleet Manager is a specialised B2B platform for Home Assistant integrators. You install a custom integration on each customer instance, and from then on you see the state of the whole portfolio in one dashboard: which instance is online, which integrations and HACS plugins are running at which version, whether critical logs are stacking up. Remote access to the HA frontend runs over an outbound WebSocket relay, works behind CGNAT, no open port, no full-network VPN, and only kicks in after the customer has flipped a switch to grant a time-boxed maintenance window. After that the door shuts again on its own. Hosting is in the EU. How this customer-controlled consent works as a selling point (“local stays local”, the customer is the caller, not the one being called), I’ve written up separately, because it’s less a technical question than a question of trust.

What it isn’t: a finished, decades-hardened product with the feature surface of an established RMM suite. It’s young. No voice support, no PSA integration, no mobile app of its own as it stands. For a single private instance it’s overkill; the value only starts somewhere north of a handful of installations. And it asks you to trust a central relay component. That’s a deliberate choice, not a detail to market away. If you want to dig deeper into the options, the comparison of six ways to manage multiple HA instances lays out a decision tree that also says honestly when a different tool fits better.

The boundary, in one sentence

For your one instance, take whatever suits you best: Nabu Casa, Tailscale, Cloudflare, all three are good answers. The moment those turn into customer instances, the question stops being how you get in from outside. It becomes whether you keep the overview, and that doesn’t come from a thirtieth login but from a dashboard that takes Monday morning off your hands. So HA Fleet Manager isn’t a Nabu Casa alternative at all. It’s a different product category, perfectly happy to run alongside your Nabu Casa subscription. If you’re standing at exactly that point, set up free access and see whether the fleet view is the thing you’ve been missing.

Disclosure: HA Fleet Manager is the product behind this blog. The credit given to Nabu Casa, Tailscale and Cloudflare is meant sincerely all the same. For a single instance I’d recommend any of them.