Three ways to run Home Assistant, one honest decision tree.
Green: the default answer
The Green is $279 of never-think-about-it: silent, 2 watts, official, updates itself. Its one limitation — no built-in radios — is solved with a $40 Dongle. For 90% of homes this is the box.
Yellow: the enthusiast board
Built-in Zigbee/thread radio, M.2 slot for an SSD, pi compute module inside. Lovely hardware, fiddlier purchase (compute module availability), and the radio being inside the box is actually worse placement than a PoE coordinator like the Slzb-06 positioned where coverage is best.
DIY: the old pi / mini-pc route
Free if you have the hardware, and completely capable. You become the sysadmin: storage corruption, backups, updates. Great for tinkerers; a false economy for everyone else.
Verdict
Buy the green, spend the saved weekend building automations instead of administrating a server. That's the configuration we install in client homes.
Skip the shopping list: the Local Starter Kit bundles the tested gear from this guide — cheaper than buying the parts separately.