![]() Do the math on purchase prices for apples to apples products in a real world deployment, and test the deployment and maintenance yourself to see which one takes more time (which equates to higher staff or contracting costs). There are a few cases where Synology can beat out Protect for surveillance, but most of the time, UniFi Protect takes the TCO cake. Synology can scale up a little larger if you have the need to put hundreds of cameras on a single unit, but that gets you into some really strange edge cases that have their own problems and challenges to address like needing to switch to flash storage for speed. Go run a Protect system yourself and you will know what I mean about how fast the setup is and how little admin overhead there is compared to a Synology camera system. I have no brand loyalty, because in a year, the tables may be flipped and I don't want to be stuck pushing an inferior product, all because of the name on the box. Call it coolaid or just an ability to do a critical side by side comparison and make a fair assessment, I look for what works, and what people need to get their jobs done to solve problems for the people I support. I have run both side by side for endurance testing, and the Protect system comes in cheaper, faster to deploy and maintain (even pushing firmware updates not just to the system but the cameras too from my phone on the go if needed), and the customers I have deployed for have no usability complaints, even remarking how much more modern the look and feel of Protect is over Surveillance Station. Synology's ABB product is amazing, the surveillance just falls short for our use cases. Like I said elsewhere, I use the right product for the right situation. Sorry I know how and where to use the product unlike a lot of consumers that simply don't get how to design or implement it properly. Cheap enough compared to other business offerings to keep spares on the shelf. We did have one camera out of the dozens we run die, but a quick adopt of the replacement and everything was back up and running. Testing a flex for the past 6 months, and no issues to report so far. Protect integrates with the access control system they just launched, but I want to see more time pass on that solution before saying it is worth using or not.īeen running domes and bullets for about 5 years through various versions based on what was available, started out on the Video product, then migrated to Protect once it reached feature parity earlier this year. There are similar cameras out there that market similar features to UniFi for less, but none of those offer the central administration and firmware management UniFi Protect does you have to connect to each camera and update manually with the cheaper options. The cameras are decently priced for the features, and offer lots of options between the bullets, pros, flex, dome, micro, and doorbells they are lacking a good 360° camera, but no one in the affordable price range for consumers offers that. They don't support other vendors' cameras, so if you really need to pick from hundreds of models that do basically the same thing, that is a strike against UniFi. So, if you have UniFi and want to switch away, you don't have to rip and replace the cameras, just change the recorder to something that supports RTSP (seems like they aren't playing the vendor lock in game others are). But if it works for your needs, go for it.įunny, you can even use the UniFi cameras on Synology they support RTSP, just off by default. Maybe they have updated things since I looked at it earlier this year, but it was janky in my testing. ![]() ![]() You can do some other hackery to view RTSP output from the Synology as well, but you lose most of the view configurability from my testing. But the interface for the cams is HTML5, so yes, a browser or app wrapping a browser is required. Turns out synology has a micro PC in a box that can output the cam feeds to a TV too, bigger than UniFi's product, but should fit just fine behind a TV. ![]()
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