Buying Guide for Home Security Cameras

Ask any security professional what the best way to protect your home from burglars and trespassers is, and the vast majority will answer “security cameras and dogs” without hesitation.

That said, the category of “security cameras” covers a lot of ground. There are thousands of manufacturers out there — millions of camera models — and sifting through the bad to find the good can be a daunting task for most consumers.

Not to worry. We’ve spent thousands of hours reviewing countless security cameras to give you the most detailed information available on these pieces of equipment.

We also keep an ear to the ground in this ever-evolving industry to provide you with the latest and greatest. For instance, did you know Ring recently released a dashboard cam? Or that SimpliSafe updated its cameras? We’re here to share all of that information and more.

Ezviz C1C indoor camera

But with all this new technology flooding the market, it can make the buying process a little confusing. And while cameras themselves are getting easier to use, wading through the countless features, options, and pricing plans can be overwhelming when you try to make the right choice.

We’re going to break down everything you need to know about security cameras here in this guide. We’re going to talk about what you should be looking for, what some of the best models are, what features are important, and why you need cameras in the first place. We’ll cover everything there is to know about this ultra-competitive industry, and you’ll walk away with a much better understanding of how to best protect your home and your family.

Table of Contents

• Why You Need a Camera?
• Features to Look For
• What to Know About Pricing
• Choose Your Location
• Choose Your Power Source
• Choose Your Recording Method
• Do You Need Professional Monitoring?
• Do You Need Home Automation?
• Installing Security Cameras
• Top 5 Security Cameras

Why Do You Need a Camera?

D-Link Camera Outside

So first things first. Why do you even need home security cameras? The simple answer is that they are one of the most effective crime deterrents out there. Burglars, vandals, and trespassers are all going to think twice when they see you’re keeping an eye on them.

We know some people who have purchased and installed a doorbell video simply as a deterrent. This is a great first step, but we always recommend targeting your camera purchase to specific threats or concerns.

After all, Nest’s battery-operated or wired doorbell camera won’t spot mischief-making teens cutting through our neighbor’s backyard at 4 a.m., so it might be smarter for us to go with a pair of solid 1080p Zmodo cameras and some extra lighting for our exterior instead.

Zmodo Cameras

You may also be one of the many Americans who has turned to online shopping to save time and possibly money. However, packages sitting out on porches or stoops are ripe for theft. A good security camera can help you monitor your entryway and prevent this from occurring or even help you get your packages back if you do fall victim to porch pirates.

According to a recent crime study,1 36% of Americans have reported having a package stolen from their property at least once. Of those, 44% have had a package stolen at least twice. And very few (11%) said the porch pirate was caught and the package recovered.

With this in mind, you need to take inventory of your vulnerabilities and potential trouble spots around your property. Once you understand those, you’ll better understand what type of security camera you need to protect yourself. The good news is, whatever those needs are, you’re almost guaranteed to be able to find a camera tailor made to suit them. Now let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.

What Do Burglars See?

Swann Outdoor Video Quality

Identifying problem areas can be made much easier by viewing your home through the eyes of a burglar. Ask yourself, “If I were a burglar, how would I break into my home?” Think about what burglars look for and see if your home has those vulnerabilities. Check for areas with little to no lighting at night, places that would make good hiding spots for someone who’s sneaking in, and pathways where burglars can trudge through without raising suspicion.

Once you understand the trouble spots, you can decide on a security camera that will make them less problematic. Worried about a darkened corner of your backyard? Ring’s Spotlight Cam can take care of that potential hiding spot. Want to get really high tech? Invest in their Spotlight Cam Pro that can track someone’s movements through your property with 3D motion detection.

We’ve run into dozens of scenarios like these, and though we’ve (thankfully) never been burglarized ourselves, experts have warned2 for several years that it can be traumatic and devastating to find out that a stranger has been inside your home, rifling through your belongings. Security cameras can be an easy and inexpensive way to avoid this.

The Top Home Security Camera Brands

These days, many different home security cameras are popping up in the market. But you can’t trust your home protection to just any fly-by-night brand. With this in mind, see below for a roundup of some great security camera options that we’ve personally tested and vetted. You’ll recognize many of the names, but there should be some new brands to explore as well.

• Ring
• Google Nest
• Arlo
• Blink
• Swann
• Lorex
• Reolink
• Kuna
• Amcrest
• Ezviz
• Canary
• D-Link
• Night Owl
• Zmodo
• Samsung
• Yi
• Wyze

What to Know About Camera Pricing

With so many choices in this market, we’ve found that we pay widely different prices for equipment and monthly monitoring depending on which camera or brand we choose. Here are a few pointers to help you demystify the somewhat confusing world of security camera prices:

Upfront Costs vs. Monthly Storage

When choosing equipment, it might feel like you’re balancing on a seesaw. Do you want to pay one price upfront for the equipment, or break it down into a monthly subscription for storage and usage? Do you want to pay a lot now and a little later, or a little now and a little more later, or nothing now and everything later? Don’t worry… we’ll break this down.

Each brand has its own unique model for pricing, and again, it all comes down to preference. We, personally, like using a micro SD card in our cameras and storing our footage there, the way Lorex’s cameras do, so we’d ideally want a camera that gives us this option.

Reolink Argus 3 MicroSD Slot

Of course, using local storage gets us out of any monthly subscription fees the camera might offer as an add-on. This way, we don’t have to sign up for a cloud subscription, which in most cases is pretty inexpensive per month but can surely add up over time.

Micro SD cards are also pretty inexpensive and widely available; a few brands have even added pre-inserted cards to their cameras in recent years. Wyze, a brand of super-affordable, no-frills cams, allowed us to add Wyze-branded SD cards to our purchase. And we were especially pleased to find we could use those cards to store data from other devices, too.

Wyze SD Cards

Beyond these options, we’ve also seen a lot of attractive combination packages that charge one price for monitoring and equipment all together. Canary cameras, for instance, give you the option to sign up for their comprehensive service plan for $9.99 per month and they’ll toss in the equipment — in this case, the Canary View — for no extra cost. The downside? You’ll have to sign a long-term contract.

Canary Packaging

We regularly see bundles similar to this across more traditional brands, too, like Lorex, with its emphasis on local storage and no monthly fees. We’ve long recommended Lorex as an affordable way to buy multiple cameras at once, with low-cost options starting at $35. But beware, if you are someone easily overwhelmed by an enormous menu of choices, Lorex may not be your best bet. Still, we think Lorex is a great option for many, especially bargain hunters. Check out our hands-on Lorex camera review to learn more.

Lorex Indoor Camera and Box

‘Cheap’ Cameras vs. High-End Cameras

This industry is so brimming with devices these days, we’ve found there’s a camera for pretty much any budget. It’s very much a “get what you pay for” approach, so we adjust our expectations accordingly.

That said, it’s still entirely possible to pay too much for a security camera. In our experience, we’ve gotten to know brands all over the pricing spectrum to get an idea about what you’re really getting with those higher-end brands, like we saw in our review of the new Arlo Pro 4 and the previously mentioned Google Nest.

The Arlo Ultra 2, part of our in-depth Arlo security camera review, retails for $300. This camera is indeed meant to impress, with a 4K resolution, color night vision, an ultra-wide 180-degree field-of-view, and rugged design that can withstand harsh outdoor conditions. Not to mention, this camera can live completely wire-free thanks to its batteries. That said, it’s not exactly practical as a whole-home surveillance system. Just two of these cameras will cost you $600, and that’s just for outdoor coverage. There are far less costly options that can cover your entire property, both indoors and outdoors. So before buying one of these top-of-the-line cameras, consider if you actually need the high-tech features.

Nest Indoor IQ Camera

Instead, a much more cost-efficient setup for single-family homeowners like us would be a Blink system. Those cams, now owned by Amazon, are small, fast, and reliable, and their installation is a breeze. When we reviewed Blink cams, we started with a system that included three cameras and a base station, which Blink calls the Sync Module 2. All of this cost us less than $250, a bonafide steal compared to the cost of a single Arlo Ultra 2.

Blink Outdoor

Snapshot of Security Camera Pricing

But as we all know, price is far from the only consideration we focus on when shopping for cameras. We also look at several criteria, from location of our cameras to their shape, power source, and feature set.

Choose Your Location

Once you bring your shiny new cameras home, where do you plan to put them?

You don’t have to commit to one location with a wireless camera, one of many reasons we enjoy testing and reviewing them. But the biggest determining factor we consider when deciding where to display a new camera is whether it’s an indoor or outdoor device.

Indoor Cameras

We think you will find, on the whole, that indoor cameras tend to display better on surfaces, such as fireplace mantels and bookshelves.

And even when we decide to mount an indoor camera on a wall, that process is no more difficult than hanging, say, a diploma above our office desk. It gets even easier if we get one with batteries; check out our hands-on Canary Flex review, where we discovered the versatility and simplicity of the brand’s magnetic mounting equipment combined with wire-free installation.

Canary Flex Mounted on Wall

Outdoor Cameras

Setting up cameras around your home’s exterior, in areas where would-be burglars might see them, not only makes practical sense, it also makes a huge difference in terms of peace of mind.

When we took an outdoor camera from Ezviz for a spin, we were reminded of the intimidating presence of cameras of decades past; the tough exterior and bulky build gives off an impression that anyone who crosses its path knows we mean business. For a pair of working parents like ourselves, this is more than just a wish-list item; we want the camera to scare criminals away, and whatever it takes to achieve that, we’ll do it.

Ezviz C3N, installed outdoors

For what it’s worth, we didn’t witness any funny business outside our home during our Ezviz testing period; you can learn much more about this intimidating camera in our hands-on Ezviz camera review.

Choose Your Power Source

Wireless (or Wi-Fi) Cameras

While brand labeling in this biz can sometimes confuse, just remember that security cameras with “wireless,” “IP,” or “Wi-Fi” technology all require an Internet connection to work.

You might see “wireless cameras” and “Wi-Fi cameras” used interchangeably across the many camera brands we’ve reviewed out there. That’s because, by and large, they’re the same thing: Cameras that work off a Wi-Fi network rather than physical wires to transmit data.

>> Related: How Do Wireless Security Cameras Work?

That said, wireless cameras might still require you to plug in a power cord for the actual device to work (unless it has batteries, which we’ll explain in a sec), so do keep that in mind.

Blink Mini Mounted

Wire-free Cameras

Not to further confuse you, but wireless cameras are also different from wire-free cameras. This is important to understand because with something as vital as a security camera, you don’t want to be caught unaware when it’s time to change the batteries.

Reolink Argus 2 Camera with Protective Sleeve

To keep things simple, remember that wireless cameras might not contain batteries, but wire-free ones always do. If you want a wire-free camera, expect to pay about $10-$20 more than you would with a wireless (plug-in but still Wi-Fi) camera. And, on top of that, expect to change the batteries on an intermittent basis; for us, this tends to vary based on how often the camera is triggered.

Reolink’s Argus 2 cam seemed to hold its own as a wire-free indoor camera with batteries that lasted a really long time for us; it doesn’t hurt that this camera was easy to install and move around the house, too. It’s one of many positive experiences we had with Reolink cameras; learn more in our in-depth Reolink review.

Choose Your Recording Method

It’s not as common these days, but we still see a good number of NVR and DVR-based camera systems for residential use. In systems like this, we can store a decent amount of video history through the NVR without the need to sign on to a monthly cloud subscription or attach a memory card.

This hard drive configuration tends to work great for covering large spaces, but more important, it’s a great way to record and store video on those 2K and 4K ultra HD cameras that are becoming more commonplace.

2 Swann Cameras on the NVR

Remember, though, that a NVR or DVR system, like the Swann 2-camera NVR kit we reviewed, will leave you with an unwieldy black box. If you’ve got the space and don’t mind the extra machinery, this shouldn’t bother you much; personally, we prefer to keep the gadgets to a minimum to avoid clutter. But that’s just us.

Do You Need Professional Monitoring?

Though we’ve seen professional monitoring (for cameras) offered less and less these days, it’s still a worthwhile consideration in your camera search. Here, the question comes down to whether you want to pay for a third-party monitoring service that will alert authorities to any relevant threats in your home, or you prefer to monitor your system yourself.

To many of us, cost is the determining factor here. But no matter what your budget is, the No. 1 factor we focus on in cameras with professional monitoring is whether the service actually works.

In a recent review, one of our team members put a Cove system of cameras, sensors, and an alarm to the test, and came away with one very important takeaway: The police do, actually, show up. If that isn’t a testament to the effectiveness of home security equipment, we’re not sure what is.

Police Officer checking up on us thanks to Cove Monitoring

For more on that interesting experience, head over to our hands-on Cove security system review. But in the meantime, we’ll say this: Cove happens to have one of the least expensive monthly monitoring fees in this biz. So if you are interested in professional monitoring, a Cove kit might be the way to go. Clearly, it does work! Other great options for whole home security include Ring Alarm, SimpliSafe, and Frontpoint.

Do You Need Home Automation?

For the most part, security cameras today are compatible with at least two smart home platforms. Usually, that’s Amazon Alexa4 and OK Google, and it just so happens that we use both an Amazon Echo Show and a Google Home Mini when we run tests on our cameras.

Our dog, lounging in the hallway on our Reolink Argus 2.

This way, our cameras function less as standalone devices and more like components in a larger smart home setup. In a typical Amazon-based setup, for example, we can set a trigger within our Alexa app to lock our Ring-compatible smart lock and arm our Blink Indoor Camera at the same time. We’ve used this automation when we leave the house to ensure that we’ll have a working set of eyes on our puppy and kiddos while we’re out. And since Blink is owned by Amazon, we were pleased that our Blink cams behaved essentially the same way as a system of Ring cameras did in our Amazon smart home ecosystem.

Installing Security Cameras

With the trend toward wireless or IP camera technology, installing a wireless or Wi-Fi camera is now typically no more difficult than hanging a picture frame (it might be much easier, in fact). We always recommend wireless cameras to folks who need an easy installation, but we’ve also encountered hardwired cams that aren’t terribly difficult to install, either.

Installing Wireless Cameras

SimpliCam Support Stand

In a large number of security cameras we recommend, the selling point is the easy installation. It’s appealing, we know. But we also know that “easy” doesn’t always mean “better.”

The wireless cameras we test require us, first and foremost, to pair with our Wi-Fi network to get them online. This is the way they will transmit data over the Internet, just like our other Wi-Fi-enabled devices do. And, as with all those other devices, we know that wireless cameras need to be placed within a certain range of our Wi-Fi router to run smoothly.

>> Related: Where To Install Security Cameras

Once that’s done, we begin the actual installation. This usually involves a screwdriver or drill, possibly a ladder, and a healthy dose of patience.

Installing the Lorex Doorbell Camera

Installing Hardwired Cameras

In most hardwired camera systems, the difficulty level will be higher than the average wireless job. If you’re not up for it, a professional installation might be worthwhile.

It’s also important to think about all those wires you’d need to feed throughout your home with a setup like this. Depending on your home’s size and layout, this could present a few challenges. In a hardwired Night Owl 8-Channel 4K System, for example, we’d have to route cables from the box in our living room to every other room in our house where we wanted to set up a camera. And, as an aside, we’d probably have to upgrade our home Wi-Fi speed, too – but that’s a project for another day. That said, this might be the perfect solution for some situations.

Our Final Thoughts on Home Security Cameras

Blink Outdoor Camera

We hope that in this ultimate guide to home security cameras we’ve given you a lot to think about when you’re considering surveillance for your home. Taking the time to assess the features and tech that sets these cameras apart, and using our hands-on experiences as a guide, should help you make a smarter, more economical decision about your home security needs.

We always look forward to exploring what new tech and features our favorite camera brands will release each year. Our team feels that the future of home security will be how well they integrate overall into a smart, connected home. People want more control, more integrations, more convenience, but above all else, more peace of mind.

Beyond our guidance here, we’ve published plenty of resources for even more help in the camera buying process. We suggest you start by checking out some of our best motion sensor cameras.

We also broke down the best cameras with home automation, best cameras with wired installation, the best affordable cameras, and the best cameras for outdoors. Can’t say you don’t have choices, right?

Frequently Asked Questions