Modes 1.0.0+
Modes let you define named states that describe how your home should behave.
A mode is a label such as Home, Away, Night, or Party, and flows can set or react to the current mode.
Modes are ideal for representing broad household situations that influence multiple automations at once.
How it works
Only one mode can be active at a time.
Switching to a new mode immediately replaces the previous one.
Modes are useful for:
- Adjusting lighting, heating, or notifications based on context
- Creating consistent behavior across different rooms
- Simplifying complex logic by grouping conditions under a single name
- Making your automations easier to understand and maintain
Modes are not tied to any specific device. They represent the state of your home as a whole.
Flow cards
These flow cards let you manage modes directly from your flows, enabling you to activate, deactivate, toggle, or check any mode.
Actions
Conditions
Triggers
Groups 1.20.0+
A group holds its own modes, and every group runs independently of the others. One group can track Home/Away/Night while another tracks Sleeping/Evening/Daytime, without the two ever cancelling each other out.
Inside a group the rules are the same as before. Only one mode can be active at a time, and switching replaces the previous one.
When to use a group
Without groups, every mode competes with every other mode. That works as long as your modes describe one thing. It breaks down once you want to track two things at the same time. Say you have Home and Away for presence, and Day and Night for the time of day. Activating Night would deactivate Home, and your presence flows would think nobody is home.
Put each of those questions in its own group, and they stop getting in each other's way:
| Group | Modes |
|---|---|
| Presence | Home, Away, Vacation |
| Daypart | Morning, Day, Evening, Night |
A good rule of thumb: if two modes can be true at the same time, they belong in different groups.
Creating a group
There is no separate step. Every grouped card has a group field as its first argument. Type a new name into that field and the group exists, the same way you create a mode by typing its name. The modes you activate in that group belong to it from then on.
Mode names are scoped to their group. Night in Daypart and Night in Heating are two different modes, each with its own state.
Grouped flow cards
Every mode card has a grouped counterpart that ends with in [group]. They behave like the regular cards, but only look at the modes of that one group.
The toggle, reactivate, deactivated, changed and inactive-for cards also have a grouped version.
Your existing modes
The cards without a group field keep working as they always have. They act on the modes that are not in a group, which is where all modes created before 1.20.0 live. Nothing needs to move, and you can add groups next to them whenever you need one.
There is no way to move an ungrouped mode into a group. To start using a group for modes you already have, switch your flows to the grouped cards and pick the group in each of them.
Colors, icons and widgets
Colors and icons are set per group in the app settings, so the same mode name can look different in two groups.
The Modes and Current mode widgets each take a group in their settings. Leave it empty to show the ungrouped modes. Add one widget per group to see all of them on your dashboard.
TIP
The Modes in groups example builds a presence group and a daypart group side by side, step by step.
Examples
Home / Away
Switch to Away when everyone leaves the house.
Flows can react by lowering heating, turning off lights, and arming alarms.
Night
Switch to Night to dim lights, lock doors automatically, or silence notifications.
Party
Activate Party mode for special lighting scenes or extended music playback.
Notes
- Modes are mutually exclusive within their group: only one can be active at any time.
- Groups are independent: a mode in one group never deactivates a mode in another.
- Flows can both change modes and react to them.
- Use clear names to keep your automation logic readable.
- The duration-based conditions can be inverted (using the condition's invert option) to check for "less than" instead of "at least".