Security cameras are one of the most affordable tools for protecting your home, whether it be to watch for intruders or just to keep tabs on your pets while you’re away. Most cameras, however, require an ongoing subscription if you want anything more than just a livestream. If you want a recording of an event that happened while you weren’t watching, you’re out of luck unless you cough up a monthly or annual fee.
Fortunately, that’s not the case with every security camera. Some models avoid the need for a subscription by having onboard storage for recordings, so the manufacturer doesn’t need to support the cost of a server in the cloud for that purpose. This typically takes the form of flash memory or a microSD card slot (you’ll need to supply the card, but they’re not particularly expensive, and we’ll show the which type of microSD card you should buy for a security camera). Alternatively, some cameras can be paired with a local network-attached (NAS) box for additional storage.
The other side of the coin: Which security camera subscriptions deliver the most value?
Here are our recommendations of the best the best security cameras that don’t require a subscription. We’ve listed them in order of price and sophistication and have recommendations for both indoor and outdoor models.
Tapo family of security cameras
TP-Link’s Tapo Indoor/Outdoor Security Cam (model C120) costs just $40—and you’ll often find it selling online for $10 less than that—but it has all the features most people need. You get 2K video resolution, integrated spotlights for color night vision, intelligent motion detection, and more; plus, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support, so you can watch a livestream on your smart display of choice.
This camera has various mounting options too; either set it on a table or shelf, or mount it outdoors with an easy-to-install magnetic base, but be aware that it depends on AC power—one of the reasons for its low price is that it doesn’t have a battery. One of our favorite features is line-crossing detection, which lets us create a boundary and then be notified whenever anything crosses it, be it a wandering pet leaving our yard or a raccoon entering it to raid our garbage cans.
TP-Link’s $90 Tapo Wire-free Magnetic Security Camera (model C425) has very similar features to the Tapo Indoor/Outdoor Security Camera, except that it’s completely wire-free. It connects to your Wi-Fi network like the other model, but it operates on battery power—a 10,000mAh battery, in fact—that promises up to 300 hours of continuous operation on a full charge.
Its magnetic mount makes it easy to take down when its battery needs charging, or you can add Tapo’s $40 solar panel and keep its battery perpetually topped off.
Cloud storage plans have their benefits—and TP-Link’s Tapo cameras do offer one as an option—but it’s completely optional. The Tapo Care subscription service offers a few extra features, such as snapshot notifications of the triggering event, and the ability to sort videos based on those events. But both Tapo cameras are outfitted with microSD card slots that support cards all the way up to 512GB. You’ll need to supply your own card, but that’s a huge amount of storage.
Eufy Security family of security cameras
Eufy Security’s $130 Indoor Cam S350 is an excellent camera with or without its optional subscription. It’s outfitted with dual high-resolution lenses, one that captures impressive 4K wide-angle views and the other that delivers 2K telephoto videos. Its wide-angle lens boasts a 130-degree field of view, but its pan/tilt motor enables it to pivot 360 degrees left to right and tilt 75 degrees for floor-to-ceiling views. It has fairly impressive motion-sensing abilities as well, though we found the pet detection a little lacking. Other features include Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility.
Many Eufy cameras have a small amount of onboard storage and/or microSD card slots; plus, connections to Eufy’s own network-attached drives—such as the Eufy HomeBase 3—which makes them perfect for folks who don’t want to pay monthly subscription fees. Like TP-Link, Eufy offers cloud storage if you want that convenience, but you don’t lose any features if you don’t sign up for it.
Storage-wise, the Indoor Cam S350 has a microSD card slot that supports up to 128GB cards. That doesn’t seem that much, but it might be enough if you don’t plan on keeping recordings for too long. As storage fills up, the oldest files will get overwritten automatically, so you don’t have to constantly maintain it.
The $150 Eufy HomeBase 3 can host up to 16TB of encrypted storage right on your own network, although you’ll need to supply your own drive. According to Eufy, you can use any 2.5-inch SATA drive (mechanical or solid-state). The HomeBase 3 must be hardwired to your router (or to an ethernet switch that’s hardwired to your router).
If you’re looking for an outdoor security camera, Eufy also offers the $200 SoloCam S340. It has dual high-resolution lenses that provide wide-angle and telephoto views, a 360-degree pan, and a 70-degree tilt motor. On top of that, it comes with a solar panel that’ll help keep its onboard battery charged up. The fact that it doesn’t require AC power is a big selling point, especially if you’re mounting it in a location that gets plenty of sunlight.
Like the Eufy Indoor Cam S350, the SoloCam S340 also doesn’t require a subscription plan. The downside, however, is that it only has 8GB of internal memory. If you want to store more of your recordings, you might want to consider adding the Eufy NAS box we discussed earlier.
Lorex family of security cameras
The $70 Lorex 2K Indoor Pan-Tilt Wi-Fi Camera offers plenty of bang for the buck. For a relatively affordable price, it has features like 2K resolution video capture, a 110-degree field of view, plus 360-degree pan and 75-degree tilt. Like other security cameras, it also offers sound and motion detection, two-way talk, and a privacy mode. In tests, we found that it has great event detection and was able to distinguish between humans and animals.
Unlike Eufy’s cameras, which have cloud storage as an optional subscription, Lorex forgoes it entirely—local storage is the only available option. The Lorex 2K Indoor Wi-Fi Camera, for example, comes with a microSD card slot with a 16GB card pre-installed, but that can be replaced by up to a 256GB card if you choose to buy one.
Many Lorex cameras can also be paired with Lorex’s own line of network video recorders (NVRs), a form of NAS box that you hardwire to your network. These let you store video recordings from multiple Lorex cameras on your network. Each Fusion-series NVR can connect to both wired (meaning with an ethernet cable) and Wi-Fi cameras, depending on how many channels the NVR supports. An 8-channel Fusion NVR, for example, can support up to six wired cameras and two Wi-Fi cameras. The NVR itself must be hardwired to your router or to an ethernet switch that’s hardwired to your network.
According to Lorex, connecting your camera to a Fusion NVR also lets you set up 24/7 continuous recording—at least on cameras with wired power, doing that with a battery-powered camera would quickly drain it. This is particularly useful if your camera somehow gets damaged, as your NVR will then have backup footage.
Lorex’s Fusion NVRs tend to cost more than something like a Eufy HomeBase 3, but they typically include a hard drive where Eufy expects you to buy one separately. At press time, Amazon was selling a Fusion N864A64B-series 16-channel NVR for $450, including a 3TB hard drive. You can also buy a Fusion NVR bundled with cameras.
Lorex also sells an outdoor camera that’s integrated with a super-bright floodlight for $250. Aptly named the 2K Wi-Fi Floodlight Security Cam, it has two large articulating LED floodlight panels which deliver a combined 2400 lumens of brightness. We were impressed by its high-quality video thanks to its 4-megapixel image sensor that captures 2560 x 1440 resolution video and its lens that boasts a 122-degree field of view.
Though the camera has five different types of motion detection—person, vehicle, animal, abandoned object, and missing object—and five levels of motion sensitivity, our reviewer found it to be rather finicky. Reviewer Christopher Null encountered a lot of false positives, where he received an alert but nothing actually happened.
Like the indoor camera, the 2K Floodlight Security Cam stores all clips locally on a microSD card. It comes with a 32GB card, but it supports cards with capacities up to 256GB—enough for several weeks of recordings. The Floodlight Security Cam is also compatible with Lorex’s line of Fusion NVRs.
If you’re already in Eufy’s smart home ecosystem, consider the Eufy Floodlight Cam E340, instead. It boasts an integrated pan/tilt camera along with dual LED panels that produce up to 2,000 lumens of brightness.
Reolink family of security cameras
Reolink’s RLC-1212A is a 12MP indoor/outdoor camera with three no-recurring-cost storage options; it retails for just $100. Equipped with a durable aluminum bullet-style casing that’s resistant to dust as well as jets of water, it provides great outdoor surveillance. And one of its more unique features is its ability to operate on Power over Ethernet (PoE), which means you need just a single a single ethernet cable for both data and electrical power. More importantly, you won’t need to worry about finding a weatherproof outdoor outlet to plug it into.
PoE devices do require a specific type of ethernet switch—our reviewer used a TP-Link JetStream 8-Port Gigabit Smart PoE+ switch—but there are many less-expensive options than that (and a smart switch like that one is overkill for this purpose).
Aside from that, we love the Reolink RLC-1212A’s 4K video quality, color night vision, and 700-lumen spotlight. It has a built-in mic and speaker for two-way communication to let you speak with visitors, or you can enable its built-in siren to scare unwelcome folks away. It has smart motion detection for person and vehicle alerts, too.
As for the storage options I mentioned earlier, the RLC-1212A comes with a microSD card slot that accommodates up to 256GB cards, FTP uploading to a personal server, and the option to connect to one of Reolink’s NVR units. Interestingly, choosing the NVR would negate the need for that separate ethernet switch, as the NVRs have their own PoE ports. Right now, it looks like you can get a Reolink RLN8-410 NVR for around $190. It has a pre-installed 2TB hard drive and it supports up to 8 cameras recording at the same time. You can replace its 2TB internal hard drive with a 4TB drive, and it can accommodate up to a 6TB external hard drive via its eSATA port if you want even more storage.
Less-recommended alternatives
These other security cameras can technically function without a paid subscription, but their features are significantly hampered, to the point that we can’t recommend them strongly if you’re looking to avoid a subscription. Still, they might be worth considering if you can live with their restrictions.
Blink family of security cameras
Blink Outdoor
Blink cameras have gained something of a cult following over the past few years thanks to their affordability, compact size, and ease of use. Amazon’s $40 Blink Mini 2 is one of the more recent models and it is absolutely tiny. Still, it has plenty of features that we find very useful, such as a ruggedized exterior, 1080p video quality, color night vision, and a 143-degree field of view.
The $100 Blink Outdoor 4 is a little larger, but it also has a very long battery life—almost two years—with just two AA batteries. Like the Mini 2, it’s super easy to set up and use, and its small size enables it to fit just about anywhere.
As an alternative to cloud storage, you can buy a Blink camera with a Blink Sync Module 2 ($50 if purchased on its own), which lets you plug a USB thumb drive for network-attached storage. The 2.5 x 0.75-inch box runs on AC power and has a USB-A 2.0 port on its side to host a drive.
You’ll still need a Blink Subscription plan to get person detection notifications, to record live video or motion-triggered events, and to download recordings to your phone. A subscription will also allow for automatic backup of each day’s recordings to a USB drive attached to the sync module.
Nest family of security cameras
The Nest cameras have made some of our favorite security cameras for years, and that includes the battery-operated Nest Cam. It’s easy to set up; plus, it offers great video quality under most lighting conditions.
Out of the box, you’ll get three hours of event history without having to pay for a subscription, as well as on-device person, pet, and vehicle detection. Signing up for a Nest Aware subscription ($8 per month) expands event recordings to 30 days and adds “familiar face” notifications and alerts when your smoke or carbon monoxide detector sounds off. A Nest Aware Plus plan extends the cameras’ event history to 60 days and adds 10 days of continuous video history. Both plans cover all your Nest devices.
Our favorite security cams, with and without subscriptions
If none of these recommendations fit your needs, be sure to check out this story that covers all of our favorite home security cameras, with and without subscription requirements. You’ll also find an in-depth buyers guide that will help you to understand all your options.
Author: Nicole Lee, Freelance Contributor
Nicole Lee is a veteran tech journalist who has covered everything from consumer electronics to internet culture for outlets such as Engadget, CNET, and Wired. She is a big fan of baseball, board games and tabletop RPGs.