What's a smart doorbell?

The smart doorbell connects to an app on your phone. In this app, you can choose the settings of the doorbell and view the camera videos. This way, you can watch along live at your front door or view photos and videos of earlier moments. The app sends a push notification when someone rings the bell and when it detects movement at the front door. This way, you'll always know what's going on.

With a smart doorbell, you can talk to your visitors via your phone. In addition, you can see who's at the door directly on your screen. That's useful if you don't like to open the door in the evening, or when you're not at home. After a notification from doorbell, you can communicate with the person at the door directly via the app. This allows you to tell the delivery driver at which neighbor they can drop of your package.

You can find the footage of a smart doorbell in the app on your phone. It differs per manufacturer how the doorbell stores the footage. You often need a cloud subscription to review the footage. You'll pay a monthly fee to see video footage in the app. Smart doorbells with a base station store footage locally. You don't have to pay a monthly fee and you don't have to upload footage to the cloud.

Many smart doorbells are easy to connect to other smart devices. It's sometimes possible to view camera footage directly on a smart display. Or connect a smart door lock to let your friends in if you're not home yet. You can't connect doorbells to every smart device. For example, a Ring doorbell doesn't work well with Google and the Nest Hello doesn't work well with Alexa. That's why you should buy smart products that support the same platform.