Cloud cameras charge you monthly to watch your own footage. Ring wants $100/year. Nest wants $80. And if the company shuts down or changes their terms, your recordings vanish. Home Assistant lets you run security cameras locally, with AI-powered detection, zero subscriptions, and footage that stays on your hardware.
Jump to a section
You buy the hardware, but the company owns the experience. They decide what features you get, how long your clips are stored, and how much you pay. A local camera setup flips that equation entirely.
Ring Protect costs $100/year per household. Nest Aware is $80/year. Over 5 years, that's $400 to $500 just to access your own recordings. With a local setup, you pay once for hardware and storage. That's it.
Cloud cameras upload everything to corporate servers. That means your daily routines, your family, your visitors, all on someone else's hardware. Local cameras keep video on your own drives, never leaving your network.
Frigate with a Coral TPU does real AI object detection locally. It tells the difference between a person, a car, a cat, and a tree branch. Cloud cameras often just detect "motion," which means endless false alerts.
Ring
~$900
$400 hardware + $500 subs
Nest
~$800
$400 hardware + $400 subs
Home Assistant + Frigate
~$450
$450 hardware, $0 ongoing
The key requirement is RTSP support, which lets Home Assistant pull a live video stream directly from the camera over your local network. Here are the community favorites.
The default recommendation in the Home Assistant community, and for good reason. PoE powered, native RTSP, excellent Frigate support. The RLC-810A does 4K for around $55. The RLC-520A is a compact dome at $45.
A solid alternative to Reolink, especially popular in the US. Good RTSP support, PoE, and a turret design that handles rain well. The 5MP models cost around $50 and integrate cleanly with Frigate.
The professional-grade option. Excellent image quality and night vision. More complex setup than Reolink, and some models phone home to Chinese servers (block this in your firewall). Popular with users who want the absolute best image quality.
If you already run UniFi networking gear, their cameras integrate with Home Assistant through the UniFi Protect integration. Great build quality. The catch: you need a UniFi console (Dream Machine or NVR), which adds cost. RTSP is available but Frigate support requires extra configuration.
The tinkerer's choice. A $6 board with a camera module that runs ESPHome. Low resolution (2MP max) and Wi-Fi only, but perfect for indoor monitoring, pet cams, 3D printer feeds, or doorbell projects. Not a security camera replacement, but a fun addition.
Ring, Nest, Arlo, and Wyze cameras all depend on cloud services. Even when Home Assistant integrations exist, they route through third-party servers, add latency, and can break when the company changes their API. For a local setup, you want cameras with native RTSP support.
Frigate is an open-source NVR (network video recorder) built specifically for Home Assistant. It takes your camera feeds and adds AI-powered object detection, so you get alerts for people and cars instead of every shadow and swaying branch.
Frigate uses a Google Coral TPU to detect people, cars, animals, and more in real time. It processes video locally, never sending a single frame to the cloud. The Coral handles detection in milliseconds, even on modest hardware.
Instead of recording 24/7 and filling up your drive, Frigate can record only when objects are detected. It keeps a rolling buffer of the last few seconds so you never miss the start of an event. This cuts storage needs by 80% or more.
Get a phone notification with a snapshot when Frigate detects a person at your front door. Not when a cat walks by. Not when the wind moves your plants. Actual useful alerts that you will not learn to ignore.
mqtt:
host: 192.168.1.100
detectors:
coral:
type: edgetpu
device: usb
cameras:
front_door:
ffmpeg:
inputs:
- path: rtsp://user:pass@192.168.1.50:554/h264Preview_01_main
roles:
- detect
- record
detect:
width: 1920
height: 1080
fps: 5
objects:
track:
- person
- car
- dog
record:
enabled: true
retain:
days: 30
mode: motion
events:
retain:
default: 30Running cameras with Frigate needs a bit more horsepower than basic Home Assistant. Here is what works at different budgets.
Budget Setup
~$170
Good for a single entry point. Pi 4 will work but runs warm under constant decoding.
Recommended
~$350
The sweet spot. Intel Quick Sync handles multiple 4K streams, Coral does detection. Room to grow.
Power User
$600+
For large homes or multi-building setups. The M.2 Coral is faster than USB and frees up a port.
Cameras connected to Home Assistant do more than just record. Here are automations that make your camera system genuinely useful.
When Frigate detects a person at your front door, send a push notification with a snapshot to your phone. Include a quick-action button to view the live feed or trigger a two-way audio greeting.
automation:
- alias: "Doorbell person alert"
trigger:
- platform: mqtt
topic: frigate/events
condition:
- condition: template
value_template: "{{ trigger.payload_json.after.label == 'person' }}"
- condition: template
value_template: "{{ trigger.payload_json.after.camera == 'front_door' }}"
action:
- service: notify.mobile_app_your_phone
data:
title: "Someone at the door"
message: "Person detected at front door"
data:
image: "/api/frigate/notifications/{{ trigger.payload_json.after.id }}/thumbnail.jpg"When Frigate detects a car entering your driveway after dark, automatically turn on the porch lights and driveway floodlight. Way more reliable than a basic motion sensor, which triggers on cats and raccoons.
Combine Frigate person detection with a zone near your front door. When someone appears in the "porch" zone and leaves within 30 seconds, it is likely a delivery. Get a notification with the snapshot so you know your package arrived.
When everyone leaves (detected by phone GPS or door sensors), switch Frigate to continuous recording mode and enable all detection zones. When someone comes home, switch back to event-only recording to save storage.
When someone presses your smart doorbell (or Frigate detects a person), cast the front door camera feed to your living room TV or tablet. See who is there without getting up or pulling out your phone.
Short answer: PoE (Power over Ethernet) wins for security cameras. Here is why.
Run ethernet cables, mount cameras, connect to PoE switch. Most cameras come with mounting templates and screws. Plan your cable routes first.
Access each camera's web interface, set static IPs, enable RTSP, create credentials. Test each stream in VLC to confirm it works before involving Home Assistant.
Install Frigate as a Home Assistant add-on (or Docker container). Plug in your Coral TPU. Add camera configs, set detection zones, test object detection.
Set up notification automations, add camera cards to your dashboard, configure recording retention. Fine-tune detection zones over the next few days as you see what triggers.
Our free scan checks your existing smart home devices and tells you which ones work with Home Assistant, which need replacing, and what to buy next.
Run Your Free ScanFor most people, Reolink cameras offer the best balance of price, quality, and Home Assistant compatibility. The Reolink RLC-810A (PoE, 4K) and RLC-520A (PoE, 5MP dome) are community favorites. They support RTSP streams out of the box, work great with Frigate for AI detection, and cost between 40 and 80 euros. No cloud subscription required.
Not strictly, but it is highly recommended. Without Frigate, Home Assistant can display camera feeds and record on motion, but it lacks smart object detection. Frigate adds AI-powered person, car, and animal detection using a Google Coral TPU. This means fewer false alerts and actual useful notifications.
Wyze cameras can work through custom firmware (wyze-bridge) that exposes RTSP streams, but it is a workaround. Ring cameras have a Home Assistant integration, but video still routes through Amazon cloud with a paid subscription. For a truly local setup, cameras with native RTSP support (Reolink, Amcrest, Hikvision) are a much better choice.
A single 1080p camera recording 24/7 uses roughly 15 to 20 GB per day. With Frigate event-based recording, that drops to 1 to 3 GB per camera per day. For a 4-camera setup with 30 days of event retention, a 500 GB drive is more than enough.
An Intel N100 mini PC (~$120) with a Google Coral USB TPU (~$25) is the sweet spot. It handles 4 to 6 cameras easily. A Raspberry Pi 4 can manage 1 to 2 cameras but struggles with more. The Coral TPU is the single biggest upgrade for detection performance.