Make migrating to Home Assistant (as friendly as) possible

[mkerstner]

Problem statement

Home automation platforms are not necessarily interchangeable. Users who want to switch to Home Assistant today face the daunting task of manually recreating their setup from scratch. Yet other software ecosystems have normalized migration tooling: browsers import bookmarks and settings, phones transfer apps and preferences. There's no reason home automation should be different.

This opportunity explores whether a comparable experience is achievable for Home Assistant — making it meaningfully easier for users to move from selected platforms without starting over. The scope is deliberately open at this stage: the goal is first to evaluate what's feasible, not to commit to a full implementation. Some paths may be more tractable than others — for instance, devices paired via open standards like Matter could follow a well-defined, vendor-neutral migration route, while proprietary ecosystems would require platform-specific approaches.

Reducing the friction of switching to Home Assistant isn't just a UX improvement — it's a statement about openness and user agency.

Community signals

not defined yet

Scope & Boundaries

In scope

• open

Not in scope

• open

Foreseen solution

not defined yet

Risks & open questions

• Not manageable at all
• Manageable to a very limited scope only

Appetite

Large - start small with 1-2 selected platforms

Execution issues

No response

Decision log

Date	Decision	Outcome

[Hedda]

FYI, someone vibe-coded "zigporter", a CLI utility to assist users with migrations between Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant's ZHA:

• https://github.com/nordstad/zigporter

If nothing else it serves a POC of a possible per-device migration flow which guides end-user with a semi-automation migation of Zigbee devices (which needs to be issued leave commands in their the existing Zigbee gateway before they can join a new network).

Regardless I believe that best would be to focus on Zigbee and Z-Wave as those use mesh network and can be daunting to migrate, Those two also make up a larger potion of proprietary ecosystems because they have the most amount of IoT devices on the market.