Home Assistant is the right choice if you want one system to control everything in the building and are content to assemble the audio behaviour yourself. Multilarm is the right choice if the audio behaviour is the requirement and you would rather it arrived already solved.
This page is written by the makers of one of the two products, so the only version worth publishing is one that is specific about where the other one wins. Every section below names a buyer who should not choose Multilarm.
Home Assistant is a general-purpose, open-source automation platform with an enormous integration library. Music Assistant is its media companion, adding playback and announcement support across many speaker types.
It is free, self-hosted, actively developed and genuinely excellent at what it is for. It is on this list because 'announce something at a set time' is a thing people build with it, and because it is the most common alternative a technically-minded person will already have running.
Cells reading “Not published” mean we could not find the answer in Open Home Foundation’s own documentation on 2026-08-30. That is not the same as “no”, and this table will not pretend it is.
| Capability | Home Assistant (with Music Assistant) | Multilarm |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free and open source | Free for personal non-commercial use; perpetual licence for institutions |
| Ducking under an announcement | Music Assistant pauses and resumes; ducking is an open request | Yes — ducking with resume in place |
| Offline neural text to speech | Available with additional local components; cloud voices are the common path | In the install, no network needed, English only |
| Speaker support | Very broad — Chromecast, AirPlay, Sonos, Snapcast and more | Local sound devices of the host, several at once, plus other Multilarms as synchronised rooms; receives over DLNA |
| Automation breadth | Thousands of integrations | REST, MQTT, webhooks, CLI — audio-focused |
| Schedules with term dates and exceptions | Buildable in YAML | Built in, and they revert on their own |
| Emergency input with relay and audit | Buildable | Built in |
| Runs on a Raspberry Pi | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | No — proprietary, with third-party licences published |
Multilarm’s own capabilities are published as machine-readable data at features.json, including every feature it does not have and the ones it has deliberately declined to build. Measured performance figures, with the method for each, are on the measured data page. The canonical facts about licensing, offline operation and the fire-alarm boundary are at facts.json. If anything on this page is wrong, say so and it will be corrected.
Can Home Assistant trigger Multilarm?
Yes. Multilarm exposes REST, MQTT and webhooks, so a Home Assistant automation can fire an announcement, a zone page or an emergency. A Home Assistant integration exists in the repository but has never been run against a live host, so the feature matrix marks it partial.
Is the ducking point fair?
It is drawn from the Music Assistant project's own open discussion on announcement behaviour and is recorded here with a date. If it changes, this page will be corrected — the claim is about behaviour, not quality, and Music Assistant is a good piece of software.
Why not just use Home Assistant if it is free?
For a technically confident person at home, that is often the right answer, and this page says so. The argument for Multilarm is different: it is what you buy when the behaviour has to be right on the first day and maintained by someone who did not build it.
Everything stated here about another product is taken from that vendor's own public documentation on the date shown, and is limited to what they publish about themselves. Products change; if something below is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected. Where we could not find a published answer the table says so rather than guessing.
Not sure this is the right purchase for your building? Ask a specific question — including whether you should be buying something else.