TOP 3 AI Person Detection NVR Camera Systems - UniFi Protect vs Blue Iris vs Reolink RLK8-810B4-A 

I really like Blue Iris. We've used it for years. Their support is great. It works well with every camera we've tried.

I got started with a Reolink system for under $100. Even works on my Alexa TV. 5MP 410 cam for $42 a Netgear 8 cam POE switch $32 and a 5 pack of CAT5e cables (50 ft each) for 22.00. Recording 24/7. No need for the SD card or NVR. Using Windows 11 and a USB external hard drive I already had on hand (3 TB). It is set to make MP4 video every 30 minutes. I have already added my 2nd camera and plan on 3 more later on. The windows app allows you to view up to 36 cameras at once. I am really happy with it. Thanks for all you great videos, they do help.

Finally took your suggestion and started upgrading my whole system to Reolink. Ripped out all the bnc cables and ran all new cat6. Impressive upgrade. Also some of the features have been updated on reolink since you made this video! It's a great system.

I'm looking forward to the setup video! Thanks for all of the work you do!

Fantastic content. Perfect timing as well. Setting up a blue iris server this week.

On the market for POE cameras that can successfully detect person/vehicles and Rob releases this video *hits play instantly

looking forward to view your DeepStack/Blue Iris video. Thanks Rob!

I use Reolink for a few locations and the Unifi Protect for a few others. I have also used a Synology NAS and a few other solutions but never Blue IRIS. The reason I feel comfortable with Unifi Protect in certain locations is because when depending on cellular connectivity for most locations, I have found the reliability of the connection to be unparalalled. In a summer house, chalet, or any infrequently visited but essential location, the peace of mind of getting a dependable connection even when the connection is not very dependable and speeds and latency fluctuate massively at times is very important. When setting up a camera system for someone else, knowing that they can consistently connect to their camera and have reasonably smooth viewing at any time of day seems to provide a certain ease of mind and gives a polished feel to the whole experience. I have been shocked at times how a simple reconnect or message of "live viewing failed" on Reolink left a lot of people feeling that the system is unreliable or not secure. This is my main reason and is one that I have found brings a lot of trust in the product by friends/family. TLDR: Unifi Protect when using LTE connectivity especially when viewing on the go on an LTE mobile device.

Thank you for your time and efforts on this review. It really helped me on my decision. I got the Reolink and I am really pleased with the performance and easy setup.

Thanks for another quality video about a subject I am looking into. I am a knuckle-dragging mechanic and electronics baffle me. I appreciate you dumbing it down enough for me without losing the depth of the material.

Your scientific approach to the relevant topics you hit on this channel is admirable and appreciated 🙌🏼

Great review! I've had a Reolink non-AI NVR system since I opened a small business in April 2020. I've been happy with the 4 cameras and NVR. I paid like less than $250 on Amazon. I am considering adding a single AI camera to my system and already checked to see which ones are compatible.

I would love to see a video of your whole security camera system. I’ve seen the blue iris setup but I would be interested to see camera choice at each spot around your house and why.

Appreciate your effort into making this, cheers!

Great review as always Rob, thanks for this I’ll keep an eye out for the BI review/setup Been wanting to improve my current BI installation especially now with the new version with AI

Happy Unifi Protect user here. I agree that cameras are too expensive and no VPN connectivity is stupid. But I migrated from the Unifi Video system few years back and they kept the compatibility with my G3 cameras, offered a deep discount for the NVR pro when I traded my old Video NVR and the features on Unifi Protect are regularly updated, patched and support is good. Armed with the knowledge you kindly provide I'd probably go a different route today but I don't regret the path I took, few years back Unifi was a mile better than Foscams and other systems.

As someone who is already somewhat in the Ubiquiti ecosystem (access points and switches) I'd love to expand the system to include cameras/NVR... but you're absolutely right - their prices are obscene! If Ubiquiti ended up +$200 over blue iris... fine, that would seem fair. Maybe even +$300.

Looking forward to the new blue iris video. I've stocked up on some amcrest cameras, repurposed an old PC for video, and purchased a license about 3 weeks ago.

Looking forward to the BlueIris setup video!

Thanks Rob. Really good and useful review 👌🏻

Awesome video. I bought the Reolink you tested over 2 years ago and it’s been sitting in a closet while waiting for my remodel to finish. Interestingly I had started looking at network options over the past few days and specifically Unifi Dream Machine. I was beginning to think I made a mistake buying the Reolink. I’ll pull out the Reolink and blow the dust off, I’ve already run lots of ethernet cable. After that maybe I’ll buy a few Access Points and plug them into my Modem/Router while I continue to research a longer term Home Network solution.

Learned so much here. Thank you mate!

I noticed that Blueiris integrated Deepstack and wondered when you'd do a video on that. Now I know!

Great video, great summary.

Thank you very much for this, very helpful as always.

As Great as always from this Guy. Thanks

Thanks again for the fantastic review and info. Because of you I am very happy with my Blue Iris system. Next up for me ... AI integration.

Your videos are so freaking great, thanks a lot.

Great vid Rob

Researching home surveillance, again... and again, your videos cannot be beat! Thanks for all the incredibly useful info.

Great video as always. I'm a Reolink user. To download a specific video, i like to use directly on the NVR itself to usb or from the mobile app on my phone. I find the PC client app to be slow. However, you don't have to download an hour clip on windows, you could simply use the cut tool with the bracket (mark in & out) to select a specific event to download just like the NVR app.

Great comparison. Keep it up

In the upcoming BI setup video, can you maybe go over improving motion detection in BI, specifically with using the low res feed. I find I have to really go out of my way to trigger mine. Meanwhile if I do motion on on the high-res feed it's great.

ordered with your link, thank you!

Great video with lot of work you put into I believe. Maybe you could consider power consumption next time as well since power prices keep going up. Keep on with the good stuff!

I recently switched from trying to get a good surveillance system running on my Linux server, to a NAS running my apps, and the Reolink for cameras. I haven’t had any misses from my cameras since I tweaked the motion sensitivity and trigger zones and added blocked out areas where I didn’t want the AI to read (it doesn’t use the motion mask to filter AI recognitions for some reason). I am super happy with my set up now. I love tinkering, but I have other projects I am prioritising over these things which I now consider mission critical

Been happy with BI for many years now. I do use ubiquiti but see no reason to switch with the high price tag.

YAS i was hoping for this

Do you plan on doing the best battery powered cameras for 2021? Love your videos!!

I got that same reolink NVR with those same 4 cameras. For a home made solution. Coming from nothing to this, at that price it's God sent. I saw so much stuff i had no idea was going on near my property. Could be better, yes, but overall can't complain. They also reply support tickets quickly.

Hello, Have you ever gotten a chance to look at Lorex's person and vehicle detection cameras?

love this video. great job.

Rob, sorry if someone else has already mentioned this, but Blue Iris 5 comes with the DeepStack integration included now - it can even boot DeepStack with Blue Iris. Super simple to get up and running - I only found it in the settings the other day. Also DeepStack is now free with no need to register to get/refresh API keys.

I really appreciate the justification for why to get a 6th+ gen intel processor.

Super helpful thanks 🙏🏼

Another great review man!

Great video. I won't say no to have a yearly video on this, even if they're on the same camera models :D especially with software improving with time.

Got the feeling that you were getting bored of walking in front of Cameras in this one Rob, but it's bit more entertaining ;)

On the next episode add the Lorex Fusion system from Costco or from Lorex it self. Wonder how their AI compares.

Great video, and honest opinion! 1 thing I was missing in the review is the (mobile) notifications. From my point of view, this would be essential to get instant notification when somebody hanging around my house. I like the VPN solution, but how the notifications can work with it? Do you need your mobile connected to the VPN all the time?

Thank you for the videos. Do you know if the Blue Iris docker works the same as windows version?

Just the video I was looking point for. A coworker just went all ubiquiti and I was danger close to that option myself. Instead now I'm full speed ahead with blue iris.

another great video... thx

Thanks this was useful

Love your videos. NO FILLER.

Great work on all your videos. I was wondering if you have any recommendation for a Blue Iris alternative that can be run on a Linux system?

I wasted weeks of my life trying to get blue iris to do what I want. Never got smooth playback, clean two way audio, and a doorbell camera to work how I wanted. I figured my time was more valuable and went all in on the UniFi system, got everything setup and working great right away, better than I ever got with blue iris. Their doorbell is great, better than ring since it’s completely local storage no fees and better than all the crappy Hikvision knockoff doorbells that are 70%functional with blue iris.

great video!

Thank you for your time creating this! Is there a reason to get the bullet cameras over the turret? I think I like the look of the turret better for home.

Great comparison video. Although I love my Unifi cameras I can see why most would'nt want to pay the high prices. Not being able to connect through a VPN is brutal and it should be offered

When opting for a solution one could consider that security will be effective when it is seamlessly integrated into existing workflows and routines and when the least technically interested person can enjoy the benefits from the solution. It is much like photography - The best photo is the one that gets taken. Thanks for a great assessment!

I would love to see you test the frigate addon for home assistant. It's supposed to be an NVR system tightly integrated with a home assistant with object detection.

Great video, now I need to buy a new PC for my Blue Iris :)

Thx for the great video. Could you use Reolink NVR for live view (connected via HDMI to TV) and 24/7 recording but still use the stream in Blue Iris for AI recording? Assuming cameras (all are Reolink) are not connected to NVR directly but to PoE switch (same as the one NVR is connected to).

Blue Iris DOES work with ZeroTier. I've got that setup and it works great! I use it for BI, HA, other web based services I run locally. Oh, and I forgot to mention - it's free for up to 50 nodes.

Great video... one question... you mentioned opening ports is not a good idea..but doesn't VPN require port 1194 to be forwarded in order for it to work?

I use unifi protect just because i was already a UDM-PRO user, and the cameras prices are over top i agree, but it is so easy to setup, doesnt come with a subscription and the APP and WEB UI for me are perfect for my use case

Maybe next time you can also look at Frigate. I run it as addon to Home Assistant, and while it doesnt have all the bells and whistles of BI, and its still a little rough around the edges, Im slowly fading out Blue Iris in favor of Frigate. You can run it on a Pi (using a Coral accelerator ideally) or anything that runs your HA and its AI is superb. It also ties in to HA much easier and better. Oh and its free. And open source.

16:32 You can also access via a reverse proxy like NGINX, which while does require port forwarding of HTTP and/or HTTPS ports, but will act as a gatekeeper; requiring you to have the correct domain/subdomain to connect to the NVR, which you can do for free with a service like duckdns/noip or by buying a domain as cheap as around £/$10, which any wrong domain will show an error page & is especially useful if you have multiple services that you want to access outside your network but dont want to always conect to a VPN. You can also use a Unifi local account on desktop if you port-forward/use a reverse proxy

Have you heard of / installed frigate? I've not tried it yet, but it looks promising.

I have tried many softwares for nvr and so far Frigate NVR with 45/50$ reolink poe cameras works flawless. Notifications are handled through home assistant

I know that these are wifi and max out at 1080p, but would you mind comparing the accuracy of the SimCam Alloy 1s against the others? The low cost and on-camera AI really drops that bar to entry to a basic system. I have one now and definitely have a wishlist for it, but I'm not using it in a way to really test it's accuracy like you did here.

Excellent in-depth comparison! I have a question though, is the reolink setup more power-efficient than Blue Iris'? I'm looking for a camera system for a cottage that I'm building. The small house runs out of off-grid solar power, and a 24h running system have a high impact on the dimensioning of my "power plant". Given that Blue Iris requires a powerful PC, and I'm assuming it might be quite high on CPU usage for 4 to 6 simultaneous cameras, do you think the reolink NVR solution has some intelligence when it comes to AI resources usage? Any thoughts are welcome. Many thanks!

Everyone should watch this video, especially before investing in a security system. The downside is when a person (me) has already invested too much money into a system. 😕

Any chance you’re going to take a look at the Synology surveillance station with built-in AI?

Thanks for the video. Could you maybe consider a video on creating your own secure VPN connection to control HA etc? Afaik all of your VPN guides are ubquiti specific? Thanks

you rock!!! love from brazil

What is the Power usage of each System? This effects the operating costs.

Another great (and fair) comparison! I took the Blue Iris plunge (already had a server and cameras) so looking forward to Rob's next video. I've been messing around with DeepStack, but I'm sure there's some tips and tricks I've msissed.

I love Frigate NVR software for camera AI

7:25 I have the ACTUAL v2.1 NVR Camera System. Zero misses. Couldn't be happier! 😃

Couple of things on Ubiquiti that I wanted to point out. 1. If you setup RTSP streams from the UNVR or UDM you can view them from any software capable of streaming on that protocol (Blue Iris for example), and can be setup on any PC with the specs to run it. The video is streamed from the NVR and not the cameras 2. The newer Unifi platforms unfortunately did remove the functionality, or at least made it very difficult, to setup remote viewing. Again if you download an app capable of viewing video streams then you can view them using either port forwarding or VPN, but that's a bit of a challenging setup if you're not familiar with networking. The older NVR from a few years ago could do all three of the security/privacy connection methods you mentioned.

I think my usage case came down to I already had a UDM Pro, a 2 TB HDD laying around and possibly a little laziness :). I only have a G3 Instant ($30) currently and obviously doesn't do smart detections, but it still gives motion alerts, which is a start. Something to grow from at least. Having said that, one thing missed on the G4 Pro is it does offer a 3x optical zoom, which can be handy if you need focus on something further way from the house. If my UDM Pro didn't have an NVR? I'd consider Blue Iris. I already went down the HA route due to yourself and a few other similar channels showing the benefits. Boy, what a time sink that is! Hah

In your next video can you please touch on running the CAT cables? Cutting holes in joists and soffits seems like a risk. Is there an easy way to do it? Also, does BlueIris have License Plate Recognition ? I would love this feature, but there are only a few companies that offer it at very high price points.

Would love to see a Blue Iris vs Camect AI detection capabilities video

Great video!! There's just one thing I don't understand about any of these systems: If someone breaks in to my home and steals the NVR (which the probably will as they all look expensive) what am I left with? An automatic email of the event? Can I setup some sort of upload to a cloud service of my choice so that when/if the intruder steals the NVR I still have pictures/video of it?

I've gone with Unifi. Spent a lot of time trying to justify the extra expense vs BlueIris/DeepStack or Reolink. For me I already have all the Unifi bits, so it's just much easier to set up. I can plug and play. At the moment, only need one camera, so got a G4 Pro. just don't have time to setup BlueIris, which would probably be my alternative. I look forward to your video on that but just looked too daunting to me (+ I'd need new hardware for it)

On the Reolink NVR, can one access each camera via RTSP for use in Home Assistant? Do IP addresses get assigned via your router's DHCP server or does the NVR keep the cameras within a "closed network' with the only IP accessible being the NVR's IP? I recall that you did an in-depth review where the Reolink camera came up tops over the Annke. With that in mind, the Reolink is a very attractive NVR option although the power user in me will side with the Reolink cameras and Blue Iris as the NVR. :) Great video and looking forward to the set up guide for Blue Iris.

Can you do an update of the software of these systems? is the Blue Iris still much better than the ubiquiti?

Thanks for the video, small advantage for Unify Protect, it can be used with homebridge how does it perform through it ?

Thanks for a great video. I recently purchased the Reolink RLN8-410 which is very similar to your review model. The biggest disappointment for me is the software. As you mentioned, there is no way to access AI detected events except the phone app. The windows client and web interface are a little clunky and non-intuitive. I notice that the nvr itself runs very hot. So much so that I actually opened the case to see what was going on inside. There is a passive heatsink in use, I'm tempted to replace it with something bigger perhaps with a fan.

Another epic video! Like Christmas every time I get the video notification. Do you plan on doing a video/ giving recommendations on best License Plate Recognition cameras and setup (especially at night W/ headlight glare)? Does Blue iris have license plate recognition?

0:03 - You've got my Thumbs Up

I have that Reolink on my summer cottage with UPS. Even now and then there are power outages lasting from few seconds to several hours and because Reolink's power consumption is minimal, systems stays alive with cheap small UPS (with added extra battery) without issues. That would not happen with i7-based PC :)

I wish you made an updated version video including Synology dva3221 nvr and a highend Hikvision/Dahua camera to compare how good their AI has gotten over the years

Is there a video or guide on how to setup a VPN for a reolink nvr?

You said that you can't go back an look at the details of the AI detection on Unifi Protect, but the web interface does allow you to "Highlight Smart Detections" when viewing a clip from the Events list (or from the dashboard thumbnails). Doesn't do much to diagnose the misses, but you can still see a box overlaid on the video to show what the positives (and false positives) are. And I'm pretty sold on the Unifi Protect system, but I'm not so blinded by fanboy-ism that I can't acknowledge its many glaring shortcomings. Features come and go with every controller and app update, fixed things break again, some obvious features are just never implemented despite persistent user demand. And I knew that's how it was going to be just coming from Ubiquiti network hardware/software. Still, I decided on Protect to replace my Blue Iris setup when it was time to update my aging cameras. I think the things it does well are done really well (and I always hated the Blue Iris iPhone app). I like that it's integrated with hardware I already ran, so I could stop running the single-purpose PC I had for Blue Iris. Unifi Protect is one of those choices that I know doesn't make a lot of objective sense, but just felt right for me at the time. I don't regret it, either...usually.

Nice video, but I would really like to see the monthly power consumption comparison between these systems. I suppose the general purpose server with i7 CPU is a bit power hungry for 24/7 operation?

Thank you for shining a light on UI Protect's atrocious lack of local access. Not that UI actually will listen, but more noise is better than none.

Please compare the Reo to the Amcrest...