Home Assistant 2026.11 Adds Matter Cameras, Marketplace

Home Assistant is about to get one of its most user-facing updates in years. The 2026.11 beta, now in its final testing days ahead of the stable release expected on November 4, brings Matter cameras into the main interface, adds a preview of two-way audio through cameras and doorbells, and folds the long-running Home Assistant Community Store, better known as HACS, into Home Assistant itself as a built-in Marketplace. For anyone running a local smart home, this is not a quiet maintenance release: it changes how cameras work in dashboards, how community add-ons are found and installed, and how some long-standing power-user workflows behave.

The beta release notes carry the usual warning, and it matters here: they are a work in progress, and not every feature is guaranteed to make the final release. That said, the headline items are already documented in detail by the Open Home Foundation, and they point to a clear direction. Home Assistant is becoming easier to extend, more capable as a camera platform, and more comfortable with devices at the edges of the home, from battery-free switches to long-range sensors.

Matter cameras arrive in the dashboard

The biggest platform change is camera support in Matter. With Matter 1.5, cameras became part of the smart home standard, and Home Assistant now supports them through its Matter integration. A compatible Matter camera appears as a regular camera entity in Home Assistant, with live video and snapshots available alongside your lights, locks, and sensors rather than locked inside a separate vendor app.

Live video is streamed using WebRTC, directly between the browser and the camera. That peer-to-peer approach matters for a local-first platform: video does not have to make an extra hop through a cloud service to reach your dashboard. The camera entity also follows the state of the camera itself, including whether its privacy mode is switched on, so what you see in Home Assistant should match what the camera is actually doing.

There is one practical catch. Home Assistant only discovers Matter cameras when the connected Matter server is recent enough to support them. If a camera does not appear, the Matter server version is the first thing to check, before assuming the camera itself is incompatible. Matter cameras are still a young category, and early adopters should expect some rough edges while manufacturers and the platform align on the new camera features.

Talk back through your cameras

Alongside the camera support comes a feature many camera owners have wanted for years: two-way audio. A new Labs preview adds a talk button to the live camera stream, letting you speak to whoever is near a camera or video doorbell without opening another app. It is switched on under Settings, then System, then Labs, which signals its status clearly. This is a preview, not a finished, fully supported feature.

At launch, the talk button appears only for cameras that support two-way audio and whose integration has added support for it. In this release, that means Matter cameras and Reolink cameras. Reolink cameras need to use RTSP, the Real-Time Streaming Protocol, because RTMP and FLV streams cannot carry audio back to the camera. That detail will decide whether an existing Reolink setup gains the feature or not, so it is worth checking how a camera is connected before expecting talkback to work.

There is also a browser limitation to know about. Browsers only allow microphone access over a secure connection, so for now two-way audio works when Home Assistant is opened over HTTPS. The developers say they are working on bringing it to the Home Assistant companion apps over HTTP as well, but no date has been given for that change. For remote access, that makes a secure setup more than a nice-to-have.

HACS becomes the built-in Marketplace

The change most existing users will notice first is the Marketplace. For years, community integrations, dashboard cards, themes, and templates were found through HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, a community project that had to be installed separately. With 2026.11, HACS becomes part of Home Assistant as the new Marketplace, found under Settings, then Marketplace. It ships with Home Assistant, works with every installation type including Home Assistant Container, and requires no manual downloading or unpacking of files.

Installing something gets noticeably shorter. Under HACS, you downloaded an integration, restarted Home Assistant, then went to Devices and services and searched for it again to set it up. In the Marketplace, you select Install and land straight in its setup flow, without a restart. Updates still need a restart for now. Project pages also show more useful context before you install, including download counts, GitHub stars, and the Home Assistant version required, and every installed project gets an update entity, so its updates appear under Settings, then Updates, next to Home Assistant itself.

Two clarifications are important. First, everything in the Marketplace is free, and the project says that will not change. Second, community projects are still community projects: they are not tested, audited, or supported by the Home Assistant project, and they run inside your Home Assistant. The first visit shows a notice to that effect, and installing or updating requires accepting it. Browsing works before that, but installing does not.

For current HACS users, the migration is designed to be uneventful. Home Assistant migrates an existing HACS setup when it starts after the update, keeping installed projects, custom repositories, and update entities, and links and bookmarks pointing to HACS now open the Marketplace. The separate HACS installer stops at Home Assistant 2026.11, and the old HACS will not receive new releases, because the Marketplace now ships with every Home Assistant update. HACS founder Ludeeus donated the project to the Open Home Foundation about a year and a half ago, which is what made this move possible.

Beyond the headlines

Several smaller changes round out the release. Backups and media can now be stored on an internal or USB drive, added under Settings, then System, then Storage, as a Local disk. Home Assistant remembers the disk by its file system identifier, so it keeps working after a restart or a device-name change, and a repair notice appears if the disk is disconnected. The disk needs to be formatted already. Given how large backups and camera media can grow, moving them off the main system drive is a practical win for Raspberry Pi and mini-PC users alike.

Home Assistant also gains LoRaWAN support, a long-range, low-power protocol for battery-powered sensors in places Wi-Fi does not reach, such as a garden, shed, or field. Connecting a ChirpStack or The Things Network server surfaces a new LoRaWAN page under Settings, then Connectivity, with connections, devices, signal details, and a network map. Zigbee Green Power support arrives too, covering battery-free devices such as wall switches powered by the energy of a press, with Friends of Hue switches the best-known example. Those devices list a Source ID in their network details, reflecting that they have no parent device in the mesh.

Dashboard and automation editing gets attention as well, including the ability to exclude items from a target, so an automation can cover a whole floor except the kitchen, for example, without losing the benefit of a smart target when new devices are added later. There are also new cards and badges, color control on light tiles, live logs per integration, and a way to remove bad readings from history.

Should you install the beta or wait?

For most households, waiting for the stable release on November 4 is the sensible choice. The beta is explicitly for testing, and the notes flag a backward-incompatible change around how entity names are composed, which means some automations and dashboards could need attention after updating. Reading the final release notes before updating, and taking a backup first, is especially wise for this release, given the Marketplace migration and the camera changes landing together.

For testers and enthusiasts, the beta offers a useful preview of where the platform is heading: cameras as first-class Matter devices, voice interaction through the dashboard, and community extensions that no longer require a separate installation dance. If those three themes sound like the future of your smart home, 2026.11 is a release worth watching closely, even if you let others find the last beta bugs first.