Blue Iris

Pros

• I'm looking at the Reolink doorbell camera that gets pretty good reviews generally, and you can use them with Blue Iris or whatever.
• My camera setup is controlled with blue iris for 12 cameras which instantly casts upon confirmed alerts to a google nest hub in whichever room there's a person present. No delays.
• Instead of an NVR, I use a PC running Blue Iris. Much more feature-rich.
• Windows 11 Pro running Blue Iris ... for what I need it works great.
• Check out Blue Iris software running on a small PC - it handles local PoE camera recording with motion detection and overwrite functionality perfectly for this use case.

Cons

• The most time consuming thing for me was configuring blue iris. It was rock solid once I got it going and didn't need touched for over a year
• I use my own NVR solutions (Previous Blue Iris, but, using Unifi's NVR now.. (WITH, the reolink door cam))
• We used to have a very crappy cobbled together system running blue iris on an old barely alive Dell server.
• As someone who just went through this (used to use nest, they sucked. installed a blue iris and hiks) and got fed up with it being so finnicky I just switched to g6 protect and it’s flat out AMAZING
• For years I had a Blue Iris setup with an EdgeRouter. I had no idea what I was missing out on when I upgraded to this.