Front Porch Camera or Door Bell Camera

Hello All,

I’m looking to purchase a security camera for my front porch.
I currently have 1 Nest cam indoor, 1 Nest Thermostat and 4 Nest Protects inside my home. I’m looking to add one outdoor camera to cover my front entrance area.

I’m debating whether to buy a door bell camera or a regular security camera for my home. I would like to know if either one is good enough to cover the front porch area of my house.
If doorbell, I would go either Skybell or Ring door bell. The newly announced skybell trim plus door bell looks very good design wise.
If regular camera I would prefer a Nest outdoor cam or the Toucan wifi camera.

I would like to know what other ST community members here have done. Do you have both Door Bell and regular security camera at your front entrance or either one of them. Pls share your experiences and suggestions for me.

Thanks in advance,

See for yourself. This is from my front door: https://ring.com/share/2105262252

1 Like

@JaneL Thanks for sharing this video link. Do you have regular security camera too for covering the front area of your home ?

I’m looking for more feedback on this. Thanks in advance.

I have a 2 camera Arlo Pro camera system that I’m using to monitor my front porch and my back yard and it works awesome. Cameras produce high quality video are in a small form factor, outdoor rated, the rechargeable battery lasts 4-6 months and the integration with SmartThings and IFTTT is great.

1 Like

Both. I have 4 hardwired cameras mounted by doors & covering the front of farmer’s porch & driveway . Just added SkyBells .
I don’t need a notification every time a car or person goes by the house. Skybell location is perfect to only notify if someone is actually coming up to the doors.

1 Like

Hopefully this input is still helpful being it’s more than two weeks after your post. I recommend Nest Outdoor cam from my experience. Good connectivity, great nest ecosystem with nest products, nice 1080p picture, and lots more pro’s. I have two nest outdoor cameras, one nest protect and one nest thermostat. I also have Philip Hue lights, a Harmony Hub, Apple TV 4th Gen and Amazon Echo. I use stringify (it’s like IFTTT but with more customization in some ways). It allows my Hue lights to turn red and blink a few times when it sees a person. Then it turns the lights off (only specific lights). This is much better and more accurate than if the cameras see any type of motion. There is a delay of about 20 seconds. However, if depending on where the camera is positioned this may be enough time to alert you visually before a person comes close to the house. It’s still a nice feature to use as a person snooping around the home late at night will see the lights turn color and blink. If you preferred, you could have two flows within stringify. One for each camera/person alert. So one could turn the lights yellow while another one can turn the lights red, etc. They could activate a sound clip on your sonos speakers. etc.

If I wanted to get fancy I could have a stringify command activate the nest app on my apple tv every time it detected a person. I haven’t tried this because I figured it would get annoying but I do have a command I can bark to the Amazon Echo and it will turn on my Sony Tv, turn on Apple TV and navigate to the nest app so I can see a live view of both cameras.

1 Like

Sorry for the second reply. I forgot to mention that through IFTTT nest will automatically add a new line to a google spreadsheet with EVERY motion detection. I then pivot this data and use it to quickly build a chart showing # of motion every 30 minutes. You may think, “that’s useless” but it collects this data automatically. I only use it when I need it. Plus I can compare my data to my local Police Department’s data. I can tell on average there are X amount of motions (almost always a vehicle) from say 1:30am to 4:00am each night. If there was a robbery in my neighborhood I could quickly determine which morning had more than the usual number of motions detected. Then I could quickly access my NEST video for that day and compare the outlier vehicle to the vehicles shown on camera that commute every morning.

It’s nerdy stuff but it’s fun to look at the motion data and see why certain days may spike at certain times. It’s also neat to know when the high and low commute times are along my two streets that the cameras can look at.

1 Like

Thanks @jbradbrown for sharing the information. These are all great ideas. I still prefer Nest because i have all other nest products at home. The only con for me with the nest camera is the nest aware subscription fees. I wish they had a 7-day free service like skybell or Arlo does.

I am also in the same position as the OP, and I was also debating between a Nest outdoor cam versus a Ring Pro or SkyBell Trim Plus (if they ever decide to release it anyway.)

Just hoping to bump the thread to get a few more thoughts on the subject.

1 Like

Same here! I’m debating between Nest Cam and Ring and currently look for more thoughts on the subject!