UniFi cameras are amazing. Superb video quality (better then so called "professional" cameras from the regular security companies), easy to setup (but still an order of magnitude more work then a Ring), self hostable, and from my experience highly reliable.
Agreed. I have a UniFi Protect setup and almost all of the equipment is top notch. I don't appreciate the lock-in inherent in the system (Protect NVR only works with Protect cameras, cameras only work with their NVR, and you can't self-host the NVR on your own hardware), but I'll gladly take it in trade for excellent spousal-approval-factor.
The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in older models is stored on a very cheap USB flash drive, and I believe they write logs to it too. Mine failed a few months before warranty expired so I just replaced it with an SSD and SATA->USB 3 adapter I had laying around. Works great, is snappy, and should hopefully last quite a bit longer.
For what it's worth you can use RSTP streams from the cameras in most open source NVRs but you can only enabled it from the UniFi NVR thus requiring UniFi NVR hardware to begin with.
My entire setup (3 cameras, NAS, hdds, POE switch) cost me under $1000, and I get pretty much every feature that most of these cloud camera services offer.
- Activity alerts and optional triggers for recording
- Viewing through any browser
- Multiple user accounts
Plus if I want it, Surveillance station has a whole host of other features that I currently don't need, but are nice to have (ex: automated cloud backups, offsite storage, CMS, Action rules, etc)
As a nice little bonus - I pay zero in monthly costs for this outside of the power to run the cameras & NAS
My initial setup cost ran slightly higher than something like Nest or Google Home (ex: I paid 1k vs the roughly 400 it would have cost to buy the cameras from a cloud service) but 4 years in I'm now in the positive on the investment, since I don't have a recurring 14/month subscription charge.
So long story short - It's still my data, it's costing me less over time, and I get feature parity.
The downside is it requires a little more configuration and setup.
I have several Eufy cams and while their hardware is excellent, the software leaves much to be desired.
My biggest gripe right now is when you get a notification and tap it on Android, you get such a cut down UI, it doesn't even have a scrubber and you can't fast forward or rewind. Just a completely barebones player you can't control. Once you exit that and go to the camera history, you get a normal player with controls. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Reolink have cameras which keep the video local, but support RTSP and can upload video to an FTP server (old school, I know) of your choice. I run my own FTP server and keep the video streams in DigitalOcean spaces with a 24 hours object expiration policy, fairly cheap NVR.
