Home Assistant vs Control4 vs Crestron: Cost, Control and Who Owns Your System

The short answer

If you want one company to design, program and support everything, with touch panels, remotes and a dedicated home theater, a good Crestron or Control4 dealer is a sound choice, and you'll pay for that polish. If you want to own your system outright, avoid recurring license fees and add things like a private AI assistant, Home Assistant is the more flexible foundation, as long as someone qualified sets it up and keeps it healthy.

Many homes don't need to choose all-or-nothing. Home Assistant can sit alongside an existing Control4 system and control parts of it, so you can keep what works and add what's missing.

How each one is sold and supported

This is the biggest practical difference, and it shapes everything else.

Control4: sold through integrators

Control4 is sold and installed through professional integrators. Its own website sends homeowners to find their nearest integrator, who designs, installs and personalizes the system. You can't buy a Control4 controller at a store, set it up yourself and change its programming the way the dealer can.

Crestron: dealer-only, top of the market

Crestron works the same way, only more so. Residential systems come through authorized dealers, which you find with Crestron's dealer locator. Crestron is usually what you'll see in the largest custom homes, home theaters and estates, and it's known for deep, fully custom programming.

Savant: also dealer-only

Savant, often mentioned in the same breath, also sells through authorized dealers. It's popular for its app design and its lighting and power-management products.

Home Assistant: open source, anyone can install it

Home Assistant is free, open-source software that describes itself as home automation that "puts local control and privacy first." It works with more than 1,500 integrations, including Lutron, Sonos, ecobee, Schlage, Yale, Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter devices. You can install it yourself, hire any installer, or switch installers at any time, because nobody holds an exclusive license to program it. Its official hub, Home Assistant Green, lists at $199.

Side-by-side comparison

	Home Assistant	Control4	Crestron
How you buy it	Free software; hardware from many sources; any installer or DIY	Through an authorized integrator	Through an authorized dealer
Who can change the programming	You, or anyone you give admin access	Mainly your dealer	Mainly your dealer
Software license fees	None	Set by dealer and plan	Set by dealer and project
Device compatibility	Very broad, consumer and pro brands	Broad, with dealer-installed drivers	Broad, with custom programming
Works without internet	Yes, local by default	Core control runs locally	Core control runs locally
Touch panels and remotes	Phones, tablets, wall tablets	Branded panels and remotes	Branded panels and remotes
Home theater and AV	Capable, less turnkey	Strong	Strongest
AI assistant options	Open: can connect to a local AI model	Limited to supported voice assistants	Limited to supported voice assistants
Typical owner	Wants ownership and flexibility	Wants a polished, supported system	Large custom home or estate

What they cost

Prices for professionally installed systems vary widely because so much depends on the house, the number of rooms and devices, and the dealer. Here are published reference points, followed by what to keep in mind.

• Whole-home and luxury systems: HomeAdvisor's 2026 cost guide says that fully automating an average four-bedroom, three-bathroom home can run up to about $15,000, and that luxury, fully connected homes run around $10,000 to $150,000.
• Crestron: the same guide puts complete Crestron home solutions at roughly $10 to $20 per square foot, or about $20,000 to $100,000.
• Savant: HomeAdvisor lists Savant systems as starting around $1,600 and ranging to $5,000 or more, with professional installation from licensed dealers. Real whole-home Savant projects are usually well above that starting point.
• Control4: pricing is set by each dealer. It's generally positioned below Crestron and is common in mid-size and larger homes.
• Home Assistant: the software is free and the official hub is $199, but most of the cost of a finished system is devices and labor. HomeAdvisor puts professional smart home labor at about $80 to $100 an hour on average, higher in expensive markets.

Treat all of these as rough ranges, not quotes. The best comparison is two or three written proposals for the same list of rooms and devices. For a detailed breakdown of what a private AI setup costs, including our own fixed prices, see what a private AI home assistant costs.

Ownership and lock-in: the question most people skip

With a dealer-only system, the programming that makes your house work lives in project files that the dealer controls. That isn't sinister. It's how those platforms protect quality. But it does mean:

• Changes, even small ones like renaming a scene, usually go through your dealer.
• If you move away from your dealer, a new one may need your original project files and passwords to avoid starting over.
• Some features depend on ongoing license or service plans.

With Home Assistant, the configuration is yours. You can hold the administrator account, export backups and hand them to any installer. The trade-off is that nobody is automatically responsible for it. You need a person, or a care plan, to keep it updated and fix things when a device changes.

Whatever you choose, ask for these in writing at handoff: administrator credentials in your name, a copy of the configuration or project files, a device list, and the network passwords. Our guide to choosing a smart home installer has the full checklist.

Reliability and local control

All three platforms can run the core of your house locally, so lights and locks don't stop when the internet goes down. Home Assistant is built around this. Its own description says it keeps data local by default and lets you reach your smart home even when the internet is down.

In practice, reliability comes from three things more than from the brand: a solid network (most "smart home problems" are Wi-Fi problems), dedicated hardware rather than a spare laptop, and someone watching for updates. That's why we start every install with the network and security layer.

Where each one wins

Choose Crestron if

• You're building or fully renovating a large custom home and want one integrated system for AV, lighting, shades and climate.
• You want branded keypads and touch panels in every room and a dealer on call.
• Budget is secondary to polish and depth.

Choose Control4 if

• You want a professionally supported, easy-to-use system without Crestron-level cost.
• You like the idea of a single remote and app for the whole house.
• There's a dealer near you whose work and responsiveness you trust.

Choose Home Assistant if

• You want to own your system and not pay license fees.
• You care about privacy and keeping data in the house.
• You want to mix brands freely and add new things later, like leak sensors, energy monitoring or a private AI assistant.
• You're comfortable with a care plan or a capable installer rather than a dealer contract.

The AI question

This is where the platforms diverge most in 2026. Dealer systems connect to the voice assistants they support, typically the big cloud ones. Home Assistant is open, so it can connect to an AI model running on a computer in your own home. That's the setup behind a private AI home assistant: you text the house a request like "get the house ready, we land at six" and it handles lights, heat, locks and calendars, without sending your household's details to a cloud AI service. If privacy matters to you, read local AI vs cloud assistants next.

Can you mix them?

Yes. A common path in homes that already have a dealer system is to keep it for what it does well, such as AV and lighting keypads, and add Home Assistant for monitoring, sensors and automations the dealer system doesn't cover. Home Assistant's Control4 integration can control and monitor lights, room media, shades and climate from a Control4 controller on OS 3.0 or newer. Talk to your dealer before connecting anything, so nobody is surprised and support stays clear.

How to decide in an afternoon

1. List the rooms and the things you actually want to control: lights, shades, heat and cooling, locks, cameras, audio, pool or generator.
2. Decide who you want to call when something breaks: a dealer under contract, or an installer on a care plan.
3. Decide whether owning the system and avoiding license fees matters to you.
4. Get written proposals for the same list, and compare five-year cost, not just day-one cost.
5. Ask every bidder the ownership questions above before you sign.

If you're in the Hamptons, on the North Fork or Shelter Island, or in Miami and want a second opinion on a dealer proposal or a Home Assistant plan, we're happy to look at it with you. See our smart home installation service for how we work.