HACS Becomes Home Assistant Marketplace in 2026.11

One of Home Assistant’s most-used community tools is about to become part of Home Assistant itself. HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, is moving into the platform as a built-in integration called Marketplace, with the change expected in the Home Assistant 2026.11 release in November. For long-time users, the short version is reassuring: your existing downloads should migrate on their own. For everyone else, the bigger news is that the community store is about to get much easier to find.

HACS has long filled a gap in Home Assistant. The platform ships with a large library of official integrations, but many devices, dashboard cards, themes and templates only exist as community projects. HACS gave users one place to discover, install and update those projects without copying files by hand. The catch was the setup: depending on the install, getting HACS running could mean adding a repository, running a download script, restarting, and authorizing a GitHub account before the store even appeared.

That friction is what Marketplace is designed to remove. Instead of living in the sidebar after a manual install, Marketplace is set to live under Settings, be available to administrators, and be set up by default. Browsing, installing and updating items from the main catalog should work without connecting a GitHub account, a change that lowers the barrier for new users who just want a popular dashboard card or a community integration for an unusual device.

What Marketplace actually is

It is important to be precise about what is changing here. Marketplace is not a new store with a new catalog. According to the development work behind it, the goal was to bring HACS into Home Assistant as much as possible as it is, with larger redesigns left for later. The code for the built-in Marketplace integration was merged into Home Assistant’s development branch on October 1, 2026, and the development version now identifies itself as 2026.11. On October 16, the HACS maintainer confirmed the direction, saying that starting with the Home Assistant 2026.11 release in November, HACS ships built-in as the Marketplace integration.

The catalog stays the same, and the same hacs.json file that identifies community projects continues to be used. What changes is where the store lives and how much setup it needs. A GitHub account will still be needed for custom repositories and for a higher request limit, but not for the main catalog. Without one, Marketplace shares GitHub’s hourly request limit with the other devices on the same internet connection.

One smaller change: a first install of an integration may now load without a restart, though updating one still needs a restart.

What happens to your existing HACS install

For existing HACS users, the migration is designed to run on the first start after updating to 2026.11. Everything installed with HACS should stay installed and keep receiving updates. Custom repositories carry over, and update entities keep their names, areas, labels and entity IDs, so automations and dashboards that depend on them should keep working. The old HACS integration and its files are removed as part of the move.

Compatibility shims cover the most visible breakage. Old /hacs links and bookmarks should open the Marketplace, and old /hacsfiles/ resource paths should keep working. New resources will be served from /local/community/ instead. In other words, the dashboards you built around HACS content should not suddenly go blank just because the store moved.

Standalone HACS reaches the end of the road on the new version: the install script refuses Home Assistant 2026.11 and newer, so the pre-update backup matters more than usual.

What can still break

Automatic migration does not mean nothing can go wrong. The migration guide flags several edge cases worth checking before you update, especially if your setup has grown over several years.

• Custom repositories without a hacs.json file stay installed, but Marketplace cannot update them. If you added a repository by URL and it never had that file, plan to track its updates yourself.
• Dashboard resources defined in YAML need attention. A repair entry will remind you to change the paths, and Marketplace cannot add new resources for you in that setup.
• AppDaemon apps and Python scripts are no longer managed categories. They keep working where they are, but they stop receiving updates through the store, and a repair entry lists them so you can plan accordingly.
• Templates that call integration_entities(‘hacs’) will return nothing after the move. The replacement is integration_entities(‘marketplace’), so search your configuration for the old name before updating.
• Tools that talked to HACS directly also break. The old hacs/ WebSocket commands return an unknown-command error, and custom integrations that read HACS storage or hass.data[“hacs”] will find nothing there.
• HACS sidebar options such as a custom title and icon are gone, simply because the store now lives under Settings rather than in the sidebar.

None of these is a reason to avoid the update, but together they are a reason to audit a long-running setup first. If you have forgotten integrations installed for devices you no longer own, the migration is also a natural moment to clean them out rather than carry them into the new store.

What stays local, and what does not change about trust

One question is whether a built-in store changes Home Assistant’s local-first character. On the evidence so far, it does not. Marketplace polls the catalog online, as HACS did, checking for new versions every six hours. What you install still runs on your own hardware, and your automations still run locally.

The trust model does not change either. Nothing in the catalog is tested, audited or supported by the Home Assistant project itself, and every user still has to accept a warning before anything installs or updates. Marketplace being built in does not turn community projects into official integrations.

Two guardrails are new. Installing a community integration that replaces a built-in integration takes an extra confirmation, which should reduce accidental overrides. And if the catalog marks a repository as critical, Marketplace uninstalls it at once and restarts Home Assistant. Those are sensible protections for a store that is about to become much more visible to beginners, but they do not remove the basic responsibility: community code is maintained by its own authors, and problems with a downloaded card or integration still belong in that project’s own repository.

What to do before and after updating

If you are still on Home Assistant 2026.10 or older, nothing changes yet. Keep using HACS as before; the existing documentation still applies until you update. When 2026.11 arrives, the checklist is short but worth following in order.

• Take a full backup before updating. The documentation advises restoring a backup rather than downgrading if you need to go back, and it does not confirm that the migration can be undone by downgrading alone.
• Search your configuration for integration_entities(‘hacs’) and update any templates you find to use ‘marketplace’.
• Check whether your dashboard resources are defined in YAML, and whether you rely on any AppDaemon app or Python script installed through HACS, since those will no longer be managed.
• After updating, look in Settings and then Repairs for anything the migration flagged, and work through those entries before assuming everything carried over cleanly.
• If something breaks, report Marketplace problems to the Home Assistant core issue tracker under the marketplace label, and report problems with a specific card or integration to that project’s own repository.

Why this matters beyond Home Assistant

For the wider smart home market, the move is a sign of how far local, open home automation has come. Bringing the community store into the platform by default puts community innovation one menu away from every Home Assistant user, without requiring a cloud subscription or a particular brand of hub.

That visibility cuts both ways. Easier discovery should help good projects find an audience faster, but beginners will also meet the same trust trade-off experienced users know: the catalog is broad precisely because it is not curated like an official app store. The new warnings help, but they are not a substitute for checking what a project does and whether it is still maintained.

Read this as a well-sourced preview, not a finished release announcement. The integration has been merged into the development branch and the maintainer has confirmed the plan, but final release notes for 2026.11 have not yet shipped. For most users, the message is simple: back up, check the known edge cases, and expect the store you already use to show up in Settings, under a new name, when November’s update arrives.