GlassHome vs Mushroom cards

At a glance

The honest part first

Mushroom deserves its popularity. The cards are genuinely good-looking, the project is actively maintained, and it is free and fully open-source. Thousands of beautiful Home Assistant dashboards are built on it. If you like the craft of dashboard building, you will be happy with Mushroom, and we would rather tell you that than oversell.

GlassHome is a separate application you install, and the dashboard app itself is closed-source (the widget SDK, CLI, UI library, and widget collection are open). Mushroom lives inside the dashboard system you already have. Those are real differences, not footnotes.

Cards are parts. GlassHome is the product.

Mushroom upgrades the pieces of your dashboard, but the dashboard is still yours to design. You pick a theme, lay out every view, tune spacing and colors, and keep it all consistent as HA and your cards update. The result can be stunning, and it is exactly as consistent as your patience.

GlassHome ships the finished result: glass surfaces, depth, motion, dark and light both first-class, sensible defaults for every widget. You drag widgets where you want them and you are done. No theme hunting, no cross-card consistency work, no design taste required.

The work Mushroom leaves you with

• Choosing and installing a theme that matches the cards
• Designing and building the layout of every view yourself
• Keeping spacing, colors, and card behavior consistent across views
• Re-checking everything when HA, the theme, or the cards update
• Solving wall-tablet and kiosk needs with separate add-ons and hacks

Built for the wall and the family

Mushroom has no opinion about wall tablets, guests, or family members; that is not its job. GlassHome is built around the household: kiosk devices pair with a code and auto-load one dashboard, family members get their own theme and last-viewed dashboard, guests can be scoped to a single room, and room-by-room navigation swaps the whole layout with one tap.

You can use both

GlassHome runs alongside Home Assistant on its own port, so your Mushroom-based dashboard stays untouched. A common setup: GlassHome on the wall tablet and the family phones, your handcrafted Mushroom dashboard for your own tinkering. Nothing to migrate, nothing to undo.

Pricing, honestly

Mushroom is free, forever, full stop. GlassHome has a permanent free tier too: connect HA, use the official widgets, default theme, no account needed for local use. PRO unlocks community widgets and custom theming for a one-time $19.99 during the early-bird window ($39.99 after launch). PRO is a one-time purchase, not a subscription.

Who should use which

Stay with Mushroom if: you enjoy designing and assembling your own dashboard, you want everything free and fully open-source, or your handcrafted setup already makes you happy.

Pick GlassHome if: you want the finished look without the assembly, you run wall tablets or share the home with family, or you would rather install widgets from a registry than curate HACS repos.

FAQ