I really, really like the $229 Nest Hello video doorbell (roughly £165/AU$290 converted) and believe it deserves your strong consideration alongside Ring, August and SkyBell.
At first glance, the Nest Hello is an HD live streaming camera-buzzer combination like any other smart doorbell. View the video feed from your phone or computer, receive push alerts and emails when the camera detects motion, sees a person or hears a loud sound — and review three hours of saved images for free. There’s other neat stuff, like scheduling and geofencing if you want to control when the camera is on and off.
But my favorite thing about the Nest Hello is its ability to scan faces and tell you who is at your front door from images of friends and family members you ID in the app. Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to the Nest Aware service to create your own face-scanning database, which starts at $5 a month. No other video doorbell I’ve tested offers facial recognition, though, and I liked it more than I expected. The fact that Nest now offers such a comprehensive lineup of smart home and home security products doesn’t hurt either because many of the devices work together fairly seamlessly. You can also ask Alexa or Google Assistant to pull up your Hello doorbell’s live feed on a screen-compatible device.
