The best smart lock for Home Assistant is the Kwikset SmartCode 916 Z-Wave. It talks to Home Assistant over Z-Wave through the Z-Wave JS integration, which means the whole path — lock, radio, stick, automation — sits inside your house with no vendor cloud and no account to sign into. Nothing on this page is more dependable than that, and the cost is that you need a Z-Wave stick and you give up a phone app the rest of the household already understands.
The only question that separates these locks
Every lock in this category is described as “works with Home Assistant.” That phrase covers two completely different arrangements, and which one you get decides whether your front door automation is infrastructure or a nice-to-have.
- Local integrationstalk to the lock directly over a radio in your house — Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth or Matter over Thread. Home Assistant sends the command, the lock hears it, and no part of that requires the internet. Your automations keep working through an outage, a vendor server problem, or the company deciding to change its API.
- Cloud integrationstalk to the manufacturer's servers, which then talk to the lock. Home Assistant's August integration is documented as cloud push, so an unlock command leaves your house, crosses the internet twice, and comes back. It works well when everything is up. When the internet is down, or the vendor is having a bad morning, Home Assistant cannot operate the lock at all — even though you and the lock are in the same room.
Neither is disqualifying on its own. A cloud-integrated lock is still a good lock, and a keypad and a key do not care about your network. But if the reason you run Home Assistant is that you would rather not depend on somebody else's servers, then the integration path is the specification to shop on, and it is the one every product page buries.
Check the integration before you check the lock.Home Assistant publishes the connection class of every integration — local push, local polling, cloud push, cloud polling — on the integration's own documentation page. Read that line first. It tells you more about how the lock will behave in your house than any specification on the box.
How we ranked them
Integration path first: local beats cloud, and a documented official integration beats a community one. Then what the lock still does when Home Assistant is off — because a front door must work for people who do not know what an automation is, which means a keypad, a key or both. Then the physical install, since a retrofit and a full deadbolt replacement are different jobs with different landlord implications. Then battery arithmetic, because a lock polled frequently by a hub is a lock whose cells you will be changing more often than the manufacturer's figure suggests. The full rubric, compiled from published specifications and standards rather than bench testing, is at our methodology.
Integration classes as published in Home Assistant's own integration documentation, August 2026. Hardware specifications compiled from manufacturer sources.| Lock | Home Assistant path | Works with internet down | Install | Power |
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| Kwikset SmartCode 916 | Z-Wave JS — local | Yes | Full deadbolt replacement | 4x AA |
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| SwitchBot Lock Pro | SwitchBot Bluetooth — local | Yes, within Bluetooth range | Retrofit, interior side only | Rechargeable pack |
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| August Wi-Fi Smart Lock | August — cloud push | No | Retrofit, interior side only | 2x CR123A |
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| Yale Assure Lock 2 | August — cloud push (Yale Access) | No | Full deadbolt replacement | 4x AA |
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Kwikset SmartCode 916 — the local answer
Z-Wave is an unfashionable choice in 2026 and it is still the correct one for a lock you intend to automate. Home Assistant's Z-Wave JS integration speaks to the lock directly through a stick plugged into your machine: no bridge, no vendor account, no API that can be deprecated, and no internet dependency of any kind. Lock and unlock commands, battery reporting and user-code management all arrive as ordinary local entities.
It is a full deadbolt replacement with a touchscreen keypad and Kwikset's SmartKey cylinder, so the lock is completely usable by anyone in the house who has never heard of Home Assistant — code, key, thumbturn — and your automations sit on top rather than underneath. That separation is what makes it a sensible front door rather than a hobbyist project.
Two honest costs. You need a Z-Wave controller, which is a purchase and a small amount of setup, and if you have no Z-Wave devices at all that is a real barrier — the protocol trade-offs are laid out in our Z-Wave, Zigbee and Matter guide. And the polished consumer app experience of the Yale and August below is simply not part of the deal here. What you get instead is a lock that behaves identically on the worst day your internet has all year.
SwitchBot Lock Pro — local, and no drilling
Home Assistant's SwitchBot integration connects locally over Bluetooth and, per its own documentation, does not require a SwitchBot hub or a cloud account — the encryption key for the lock can be entered by hand instead of signing in. That combination is unusual: local control, a retrofit install, and no vendor infrastructure in the path.
It is a retrofit, which is the reason many people choose it. The mechanism mounts on the inside of your existing deadbolt and turns the thumbturn, so the exterior of the door is untouched, your keys keep working and nothing is drilled — the whole argument of our renters and no-drilling roundup. For a rented flat where a Z-Wave deadbolt is not an option, this is the local-control lock.
The constraint is Bluetooth range. Your Home Assistant machine, or a Bluetooth proxy, has to be near enough to the door to hold a connection, and in a house with thick walls that usually means adding a small ESP-based proxy nearby. That is a genuine extra step, and it is the difference between this and the Z-Wave lock above, whose radio was designed for exactly this distance problem.
August Wi-Fi Smart Lock — the best cloud-path lock
Home Assistant ships an official August integration, and it is one of the better-maintained cloud integrations in the project: locks, doorbells and keypads all appear, and it covers August's own hardware as well as Yale Access models. The lock itself is the retrofit we recommend most often for renters, because it keeps your existing exterior hardware and your existing key while adding app unlock, remote access and auto-unlock — the full write-up is in our August review.
The catch is the one stated at the top of this page: the integration is documented as cloud push, so Home Assistant reaches the lock by way of August's servers. Your automations therefore inherit your internet connection and August's uptime. In practice the lock keeps working perfectly well by keypad, key and Bluetooth during an outage — you simply lose the automation layer, not the door. Whether that is acceptable is a personal call, and for many households it plainly is.
Yale Assure Lock 2 — the same path, a better door
The Assure Lock 2 reaches Home Assistant through the same August integration, because Yale Access and August are the same platform underneath. So the integration story is identical to the lock above: official, well maintained, cloud push, dependent on the internet for automation.
What differs is the hardware. This is a full deadbolt replacement rather than a retrofit, with a touchscreen keypad on the outside and a keyed cylinder on the version we rank, which makes it the better lock for a house you own and the one we pick as best overall in our main smart lock roundup. If you want the nicest door hardware here and can live with a cloud integration path, this is the lock. If the local path is the whole point of running Home Assistant, go back to the Kwikset.
What about Matter?
Matter is the obvious answer to this entire problem and it is arriving unevenly. A Matter-over-Thread lock, paired to Home Assistant through a Thread border router, is local by design with no vendor cloud anywhere — exactly the Z-Wave arrangement above without the unfashionable radio. The reason this page does not simply say “buy a Matter lock” is that support is model-specific and version-specific in a way that no marketing page makes clear: whether a given lock ships with Matter, gains it by firmware, or needs the manufacturer's own bridge to expose it varies by product and sometimes by production batch.
The practical advice is to check the specific model's current documentation rather than the brand, and to treat “Matter compatible” on a box as a question rather than an answer — the same discipline our Matter explainer applies to the rest of the category. Where Matter is confirmed for the exact model you are buying, it moves that lock into the local column and it is the best outcome available. Where it is not, the four locks above are the field.
Getting the lock into Home Assistant without regret
Three things are worth deciding before the lock arrives rather than after. First, where the radio lives: a Z-Wave stick on a machine in a cupboard two floors from the front door is a weak mesh, and a Bluetooth integration with no proxy near the door is an unreliable one. Both problems are cheap to solve in advance and irritating to diagnose later. Second, how the lock behaves when Home Assistant is not running at all — every lock here works by keypad or key regardless, and that is the property that makes automating a front door reasonable rather than reckless. Third, battery cadence: a lock being polled by a controller runs its radio more often than a lock sitting idle, so plan for the shorter end of the manufacturer's range and read our smart lock battery guide before you assume a year.
It is also worth deciding what you actually want the automation to do. The genuinely useful patterns are modest: lock the door at a set time if it was left unlocked, notify when a specific user code is entered, or unlock when a presence condition and a doorbell press coincide. The patterns that go wrong are the ambitious ones — auto-unlock on arrival, in particular, is the feature most likely to leave a door open because a phone briefly decided it was home. Our smart lock security guide covers where those risks actually sit.
