Wyze Cameras Review

I've used several different Wyze cameras over the years (Cam V3, Cam OG, and Floodlight), and while each camera may work slightly differently, overall they all have the same issues. This page covers my most common issues with Wyze cameras and why I recommend choosing a different brand. I will cover some of the positives as well, but I don't believe they overcome the negatives.

Functionality

Connection Times

I've found all my Wyze cameras to take about 3 seconds to connect at the best of times. Many times it will take 15 seconds for unknown reasons. Sometimes a camera will just refuse to connect entirely for a while. Try again in a few minutes and it might work. I've had non-stop connection issues with all Wyze cameras I have owned over several years.

While writing up this page I opened up several cameras to check on various things. Nearly half of them either took close to a minute to load or failed entirely saying they were offline. All the cameras are well within wifi range.

App Issues

Over time as Wyze has updated their app, various issues have come and gone. One thing that is constant however are bugs. The most frustrating bugs for me have been several times where I have had to clear all the app cache and settings before it would load any of my cameras. It's not worth spending your time fighting a never ending battle with frustrating app problems.

Additionally, different generations of cameras have entirely different UIs within the app. Feature like viewing recorded alerts or viewing the SD card recordings exist in different places with entirely different interfaces, how fun!

No RTSP Support

One day in the future you may want to explore expanding beyond basic Wyze Cameras. If so, it would be nice to bring all your cameras under one roof. Wyze cameras do not support RTSP which means you cannot use 3rd party NVR systems to manage or view them. In my security camera journey I've come to realize that RTSP support is mandatory to not get locked into a company's ecosystem.

There are some bridges that can take Wyze cameras and create an RTSP stream from them to help solve this issue. I've never gotten them to work and it's a hacky solution at best. Instead, support a company that supports open standards like RTSP.

SD Card Support

This one should have been a positive, and it is... until it isn't. Writing to an SD cart is a good backup to the cloud event recordings, and being able to access these recordings remotely is nice as well. You will find that you only check the SD card recordings when you need to review something. One of these times you'll find that the SD card failed and Wyze never bothered to notify you, and so that important event you thought you had recorded isn't recorded.

This is a deal-breaker. You cannot use the SD card recordings for Wyze cameras if the records won't be there when you need them. This is just a false sense of security. I guess you just need to remember to check each camera daily to make sure it's still working.

You do need to purchase SD cards rated to be used for continual recording, but even still Wyze is hard on SD cards and they will fail a lot. It doesn't help that Wyze has had bugs in the past which caused SD cards to fail even faster than usual. The savings you gain through SD cards instead of paying for cloud storage or a better solution with an NVR are lost to SD card replacement costs.

FloodLight

There's not much to say here. The Wyze Floodlight is trash. the PIR sensor is trash. Don't get it, it doesn't work.

Notifications

Too Many Alerts

While you can choose which area of the camera's view to use for motion detection, there are still a lot of issues. In the past I regularly received notification alerts for motion that occurred outside of the detection zone.

Inside the detection zone you'll get alerts for waving tree branches or changes in sunlight constantly. Good luck adjusting it to your needs.

One of my outside cameras is configured to listen for glass breaking and gunshot sounds. I get on average one notification for one of the other when neither has ever happened. It's no surprise that the camera can't properly detect sound, the microphone quality is the worst I have ever heard. I legitimately think these cameras would be better if they had no microphone at all. Why pretend?

Too Few Alerts

"Wait, I thought there were too ~~few~~many alerts?" I hear you ask. Sometimes there are. Other times really obvious motion events are completely missed. I have a camera pointed at my front door with a somewhat narrow detection zone due to trees blowing in the breeze. It almost never alerts when we get a package delivered and it is put squarely in the middle of the detection zone.

I've also gone through periods where the app just didn't send me any notifications. Then some app update would happen a month later and I start getting them again.

The combination of too many and too few alerts means you never see what you want to see. It is a ~~fools~~fool's errand to get these cameras tuned just right to not miss everything and also not overwhelm you.

Poor Detection

If there is a car in frame, every notification will be "Vehicle ~~detected".~~detected." Is your camera pointed at your driveway and the sun shines through the trees at a slightly different angle as it crosses the sky? "Vehicle detected"

Your dog runs right in front of the camera in perfect lighting, "Motion Detected". I hope you didn't get tired of the tons of unnecessary notifications and turn off general detections and only enable alert for Pets, because then you won't get any notification at all. The "Smart Detections" Wyze offers sound nice, but are unreliable.

Security

Positives

Subscription price for multiple cameras

At $100 a year, Wyze Cam Unlimited is a good deal if you have handful of cameras, and the price won't go up as you add more.

Unfortunately sometimes the app loses your subscription information for a period of time and downgrades your features and notifications. For me generally things start working again a few hours later, but in the meantime I've missed event recordings and have to dig through the (hopefully not failed) SD card recordings to see what happened.

Subscription is optional

You can run these cameras without a subscription using an SD card. Even notifications are very basic and you don't get the unreliable "Smart Detection" events, just general motion events.

Summary

Wyze is too budget of an option to provide a decent product. Every aspect of the Wyze ecosystem is poorly designed or poorly implemented. Wyze introduces new products and new bugs faster than they fix existing ones. Wyze has not shown proper due care for security incidents, which is unacceptable for a device that can let others see inside your home. The cheap entry point is not worth the sacrifices.

So what do I recommend instead? I don't have a recommendation for you yet. I'm testing out some camera brands with RTSP support, starting with affordable models first. I am using Frigate NVR with a centralized hard drive to store all the recordings on. So far I'm getting faster connection times and better object detection with no annual fee, but I have yet to settle on a preferred affordable camera.