[0]: https://ui.com/camera-security [1]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect-cameras/produ... [2]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect/products/unif...
Over the year end holidays I was traveling and set one up to monitor my front yard. There was actually an incident while I was gone and I remoted in to find the camera offline, totally missed it when it should have had perfect perspective. The police asked me for video and in this case I would have shared it, but alas could not. Sucks as I have the CloudKey box for video storage, but its very undependable in my experience.
My cloud key however, have killed a couple of drives over the years though.
The positives are that it pretty much just works. The mobile app is excellent, the web app on the UNVR is fine, and it has full spousal approval factor.
I have had very few issues with the system, primarily just the doorbell was unreliable until I upgraded the transformer and put an access point right next to it. I had an issue with the NVR right before it went out of warranty and I fixed it by replacing the internal USB drive with an SSD.
The negatives are that it's more costly than other options, Ubiquiti has had perennial stock problems over the last few years, and you're locked into their ecosystem. The NVR won't work with generic cameras and you can't run the software on your own hardware.
It's also possible that, if you have their remote access proxy set up (required for mobile app), you could be subject to the same warrant issues as with Ring.
I highly doubt it, for the fact that many of the features are incompatible with the goal of privacy and convenience.
There are plenty of on-site options that offer the bulk of the benefits, like self contained NVR systems. Once you want things like texts, web access, etc then it gets tricky. Those typically aren't offered in a secure and easy way.
This is a very subjective area. As I noted you can get all kinds of NVRs with notification and cameras, others have mentioned Ubiquiti, Roku is also getting into the home automation field, and of course there are open source solutions like Home Assistant.