The ESP32 makes more sense than a Raspberry Pi for your smart home

ESP32 and Raspberry Pi serve fundamentally different roles in a smart home setup. Raspberry Pi runs a full Linux OS and is best suited as a Home Assistant hub, while ESP32 excels as a lightweight device layer — reading sensors, toggling relays, and pushing data over Wi-Fi. ESP32 boots in seconds with custom firmware, requires no thermal management, fits in tiny enclosures, runs on coin cell batteries, and natively supports protocols like Thread, Matter, Zigbee, and Bluetooth without extra dongles. The recommended approach is to use Pi as the hub and ESP32 boards as the distributed sensor/actuator nodes throughout the home.