Smart Home Assistant

Cameras that work with Home Assistant

The camera market splits cleanly in two: cameras Home Assistant can pull a live stream from locally (RTSP/ONVIF — no cloud, no subscription), and cameras locked to a vendor cloud that Home Assistant merely pokes at. We flag which is which on every card, because it's the single biggest thing that determines whether your camera is genuinely yours. UK pricing, indoor and outdoor picks, budget to premium.

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Frequently asked questions

Which security cameras work locally with Home Assistant?

Reolink is the community favourite — its cameras expose RTSP streams and Home Assistant's built-in reolink integration is excellent and fully local. TP-Link Tapo cameras also do local RTSP alongside their app, and anything ONVIF-compliant (Annke, Hikvision) works with the generic ONVIF integration. No subscriptions required for any of them.

Do Ring cameras work with Home Assistant?

Partially. The built-in Ring integration is cloud-based: you get motion events, battery status and (with a Ring Protect subscription) recorded clips, but not a reliable live stream for dashboards. If live view in Home Assistant matters to you, buy a camera with local RTSP instead.

Can Home Assistant record my cameras like a CCTV system?

Yes — pair any local-streaming camera with the Frigate add-on and a cheap Coral or OpenVINO accelerator and you get 24/7 recording with on-device person and car detection, all stored locally. It's the closest thing to a subscription-free Ring/Nest setup and it's why local RTSP cameras dominate this list.