The Best Smart Indoor Security Cameras of 2021

The D-Link Omna 180 Cam HD is the only Apple HomeKit-enabled indoor security camera in this roundup and as a camera, it's the best we tested. The lens is phenomenally wide at a full 180 degrees, and razor-sharp edge to edge. Compared to a camera like the Blink Cam, which offers a mere 110 degrees, it’s almost like getting two cameras for the price of one. Footage from the Omna 180 looks just as good at night as it does in daylight, too. The camera is easy to get running, thanks to HomeKit’s simple setup process, and the app is pretty straightforward.

There’s just one big hitch: notifications. To put it simply, once they're activated, there’s no way to stop them aside from manually shutting them off. There’s no notification scheduling, no snoozing, no nothing. They're just on or off. That wouldn’t be so bad if there was a convenient on/off toggle, but no such thing exists; the option is buried deep in a submenu of a submenu, which makes it a chore to enable and disable. When you add in the fact that the Omna HD only works on iOS and that it’s the only camera we tested that doesn’t offer some sort of cloud storage option (all videos are saved to a microSD card instead), you’ve got a recipe for a camera not many people will want to buy, despite the awesome optics.

The Foscam R2 is functionally very similar to the Yi Dome Cam, with a few key differences. First, it requires a wired connection for setup. It’s not immediately clear why that's necessary for a camera that works over WiFi, but there you are. While the setup is more onerous than most, it’s not super complicated—we got it up and running within 15 minutes, with only a couple missteps. Second, while the R2 can pan and tilt, it doesn’t have the subject tracking functionality of the cheaper Yi. Third, it’s 1080p, while the Yi is limited to 720p. (However, Yi also makes a 1080p Dome Cam that's quite a bit cheaper than the Foscam R2.)

Almost everything we liked about the Yi Dome Cam is here, so if the Yi's are out of stock and you like the sound of its features, this is a good backup pick. The apps are nearly identical and equally usable. The R2’s image quality is very good at 1080p, and the onboard speaker is nice and loud. The cloud storage options aren’t quite as generous as Yi’s, however, which is another reason it’s not one of our top picks.

We loved Nest’s outdoor security camera, so it came as a bit of a surprise that the Nest Cam Indoor lagged so far behind in our testing. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it: It produces very good video and offers great two-way audio, it’s well-built, easy to set up, and the app is among the best in the business. It just doesn't stand out among these cameras like the outdoor version did among its rivals.

The Logi Circle, Foscam R2, and D-Link Omna all shoot sharper clips. Logi’s app is even easier to use than Nest’s sleek, but aging, software. It took longer to start streaming than several other cameras. And while others offer at least a day of free cloud backups, Nest doesn't offer any cloud storage or facial recognition without a subscription plan. The list of near misses goes on and on. If you’re already invested in the Nest ecosystem, by all means, go ahead and grab a few of these. (Especially if you’ve already bought into a Nest Aware subscription.) But if you’re not, there are better values out there.

With its low price, you might expect this security camera to be a piece of junk. The Wyze Cam is not. With 1080p resolution, easy ways to schedule alerts and adjust the sensitivity, and a genius feature that can notify you if your smoke alarm or carbon monoxide alarm goes off, this camera has everything most users would need, and it only costs $26.

The Wyze Cam’s field of view is a lean 110 degrees, the smallest of any camera we tested, but with its low price and with no cloud storage fees, you could always add more cameras for more coverage. The Wyze Cam is easy to adjust and light enough that you don’t need screws for mounting, just the included magnetic plate that sticks to your wall or ceiling with adhesive.

Wyze Cam captures video in 1080p, 720p, or 360p, and shows you how much bandwidth you’re using at all times. The video quality is very good, with just an occasional stutter in the live stream when viewing it at 1080p. Night vision was adequate once it kicked in, and a button on the live view lets you engage it manually if the Auto feature is struggling to keep the camera shooting in color when there isn’t enough light for it.

The app could be a little better organized. Its controls and settings are easy to use, but notifications and the videos you saved yourself are kept in two different places, which isn't that intuitive.

Still, we’re willing to forgive these shortcomings since Wyze Cam gives you 14 days of rolling cloud storage for free to save motion clips, and has an SD card slot if you want continuous recording. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot to love.

Wyze offers a panning camera too, and it has the same free 14-day cloud storage as the Wyze Cam v2, but we prefer the stationary camera. While the Pan camera can track motion, its movement was choppy, struggling to keep up with my family members as they walked through the room. It can also cycle through four preset camera positions, but the smoother-panning Yi Dome supports up to 10.

The audio on the Wyze Cam Pan also didn’t live up to the Wyze Cam v2, with a longer delay and less volume. If you need panning, check out the Yi Dome instead, or just stick up multiple units of the Wyze Cam v2 to watch multiple locations from one app.

The black metal Kasa Cam looks great, and its high-quality video makes your house and family look good too. It’s the best footage we’ve seen, with realistic colors and balanced lighting.

Sadly, the app doesn’t quite live up to the camera’s quality. The setup process is a little clunky, and the app oddly doesn’t let you take photos or videos from the live stream. Streaming started the slowest of all the cameras we tested, and when you’re using two-way audio, the app waits for you to finish talking before sending everything you said to the camera’s weak speaker in one chunk, leading to awkward delays.

Like the Nest Cam, Netgear’s Arlo suffered in the move indoors. Once again, it was simply outpaced by cheaper, more capable rivals like the Logi Circle and Yi Dome Cam. The app took a surprisingly long time to start streaming, and had more of a delay than most other cameras we tested; sometimes the stream would lag more than a minute behind real-world events. It’s worth mentioning that we tested these cameras on a weak WiFi network, but all were tested under the same circumstances. While others coped with the conditions, the Arlo Q stumbled.

But it’s not all bad. The Arlo Q is well made, with a physical design much like the Nest Cam Indoor’s. Setup is simple, and the app—while far from being as intuitive as Logi’sor Nest’s—has lots of options for those who like to really tweak their setup. Perhaps the best thing about the Arlo Q is that Netgear offers a full week of cloud backups for free. That makes it a pretty good bargain—as long as you have a good router and internet connection, anyway.

Canary’s flagship security camera is pretty (it reminded us of the monolith from 2001) and the app is good-looking, too. The camera also houses a very loud siren, which is a great feature if you need to scare off an intruder or play a prank on your family. (Just kidding! Don't do this. It's really loud.) The device starts streaming quickly and image quality is good, if not great. It’s also very good at recognizing when you’re home and when you’re not, putting the camera in the right mode based on that info. There are other neat customizations, like a feature that auto-populates local emergency phone numbers so you can dial with one click. Still, the app is short on options—you can’t customize much at all—and the camera is missing features common on other devices, like two-way audio. Given the relatively high asking price, there are simply better options.

Blink's battery-powered cameras get a lot of love from the DIY security crowd, and it’s easy to see why. Its cameras are small, they run for years on readily available lithium AA batteries, and they're relatively affordable. (You can get three cameras and a sync module for a fraction more than most cameras in this list go for alone.) That means you can put them just about anywhere in your house without worry, or so you'd think.

Unfortunately, in our experience, setup was a pain, the Blink app was an ugly, buggy mess, and live streaming took forever to start, often failing entirely. (Get used to seeing “System is busy, please wait.”) If you don’t care about live streaming and just want motion-triggered clips, the experience is better. Despite its 720p resolution, the Blink Indoor Camera produces very nice footage, and you get free cloud storage for up to 1,440 five-second clips. The clips are easy to retrieve, download, and share, too.