We install both UniFi Protect and Alarm.com camera systems nearly every week, which puts us in a strange position: the honest answer to “which is better?” is a question back — better at what? Here’s the comparison we walk through with clients, with the tradeoffs the fan forums on either side won’t give you.

Two different philosophies

UniFi Protect is local-first: your cameras record to an NVR in your house, no monthly fees, stunning image quality per dollar, and total ownership of your footage. Alarm.com video is service-first: cameras that live inside the same app, rules and professional monitoring as your alarm system, with cloud clips, cellular backup and analytics tuned for security events rather than surveillance hobbyism.

Where Protect wins

• No subscriptions. Buy the hardware, own the system. Ten cameras cost the same monthly as two: zero.
• Image quality and camera variety. 4K bullets, PTZs, LPR-capable optics — Ubiquiti’s hardware pace is unmatched at the price.
• Continuous recording. Weeks of 24/7 footage on your own disks — not 60-second event clips.
• One network brain. If the house already runs UniFi networking, Protect drops into the same controller and the same app.

Where Alarm.com wins

• It’s part of the security system, not beside it. Cameras arm with the alarm, clips attach to alarm events, and the same app runs locks, garage doors, lights and thermostats.
• Professional monitoring context. When the alarm trips at 3am, the monitoring station and you see the clip that goes with it — that’s a security outcome, not just a recording.
• Survivability. Cellular path means a cut internet line doesn’t blind the system that matters.
• Simplicity for non-tinkerers. No NVR to own, update or think about.

How we actually spec it

Our rule of thumb after hundreds of installs: Alarm.com video for the security layer, Protect for the surveillance layer. A typical premium home gets doorbell + entry cameras on Alarm.com (armed with the system, monitored, cellular-backed) — and if the client wants continuous 4K coverage of the driveway, shop, yard or a business, that’s Protect on its own NVR. They coexist happily; we wire both onto the same UniFi backbone constantly.

The bottom line

If you want cameras as part of a monitored security system, Alarm.com. If you want maximum footage, quality and ownership with no monthly cost, Protect. If the honest answer is “both,” that’s not a sales trick — it’s how we do our own buildings. See how we design camera systems, or book a walkthrough and we’ll spec yours against the actual property, not a brand loyalty.

Between October and December the average American adult expects around 25 deliveries — roughly double a normal three-month stretch. Package theft rises to meet it. Roughly 30% of US households reported a stolen package in the past year, about 228 million parcels in total, and more than one in four people say they have had one taken specifically over the holidays.

Most advice on this is the same five tips recycled. This is the part nobody tells you: in Utah, the same box stolen from the same porch by the same person can be either a third-degree felony or a class B misdemeanor — and which one it is depends on who delivered it.

What Utah law actually says

Utah has a dedicated mail theft statute, §76-6-1003. It is unusually harsh: mail theft is a third-degree felony — punishable by up to five years — and, unlike almost every other property crime, it carries no dollar threshold. A $9 phone case and a $900 laptop are the same offense. It drops to a class A misdemeanor only if the item has no monetary value and no individual’s name on it, and rises to a second-degree felony if it contains personal identifying information for ten or more people.

The catch is the definition. “Mail” is defined at §76-6-1001 as a letter, card, parcel or other material that has postage affixed, has been accepted for delivery by the postal service, is left for collection by the postal service, or that the postal service delivers. Every branch of that definition runs through the United States Postal Service.

So a parcel that arrived in an Amazon van, a UPS truck or a FedEx van is not mail. Taking it is ordinary theft under §76-6-412, which is graded by value — and with the average stolen package worth about $143, and 85% of thefts involving items under $100, the overwhelming majority land in the lowest misdemeanor tier.

Why that matters when you report it

It matters because it changes the report. If your parcel came via USPS, you are describing a potential felony, and it is also a federal matter — the Postal Inspection Service takes mail theft reports directly. If it came by private carrier, you are describing a misdemeanor property crime whose grading turns on the value you can document.

Practically, when you call it in: name the carrier, give the delivery timestamp from your tracking notification, give the item’s value with a receipt or order confirmation, and offer footage as a file rather than a phone-filmed screen. Those four things are the difference between a report that goes somewhere and one that does not.

Do not booby-trap it

Every December this idea goes around again, and it is a reliably terrible one. Setting a trap for a trespasser is not self-defense in any state, because the law does not let you use force to protect property that you would not be entitled to use in person. If a thief is injured by a device you set, you can be prosecuted and they can sue you and win.

The case people cite is a Louisiana homeowner who rigged a spring gun in a barn that kept being robbed for copper. A thief triggered it and was shot in the leg. The thief was convicted of burglary. The homeowner was convicted of aggravated battery — and then lost a civil suit to the man who had robbed him, for $150,000.

Glitter bombs and the various prank parcels are a softer version and have not, so far, been treated as booby traps where nobody is hurt. But the line is injury, not intent, and the risk is not really the thief — it is the delivery driver, the neighbor’s kid, or your own dog walker who picks up the box instead.

What actually works, roughly in order

Ranked the way we would actually spend the money, which is not the order these usually get sold in.

1. Do not let the parcel sit. Nothing else on this list beats removing the opportunity. Almost every carrier now lets you set a delivery window, redirect to a pickup location, or require a signature. Amazon lockers and UPS Access Points are free. If your porch is visible from the street and you are out all day, this one change does more than any amount of hardware.

2. Give the parcel somewhere to go. A locking parcel box on the porch is unglamorous and extremely effective — the deterrent is that it takes time and tools rather than three seconds and a walk. In-garage delivery, where a smart garage controller lets a vetted courier open the door and close it behind them, is the version we get asked to install most. So is a keypad or smart lock with a one-time code for a specific delivery.

3. Light the approach. Cheap, and it does two jobs: it removes concealment, and it is what makes camera footage usable after dark. A camera in the dark relying on its own infrared will blow out a face at close range and see nothing past about fifteen feet.

4. Make the deterrent visible. A camera nobody notices deters nobody. A visible camera at the approach, and a sign, are doing a different job from the camera that records the evidence — and the two are rarely the same device.

5. Then get footage that is actually worth something. Which is where most people go wrong.

The camera mistake almost everyone makes

Here is the thing we get called about every January, after the fact: the homeowner has footage, the footage is useless, and they cannot understand why, because the camera is 4K.

The problem is almost never the mounting height, and it is not resolution. It is the shape of the frame.

A classic video doorbell shoots 16:9 widescreen. The Ring Video Doorbell 4, for example, is 160° horizontally but only 84° vertically. That is a letterbox: enormously wide, and short. Pointed at your front door from 48 inches, most of that generous horizontal sweep is spent on the yard to either side, while the narrow vertical window has to cover both a tall visitor’s head and a parcel sitting on the mat — and at the distance someone actually stands to press a button, it frequently reaches neither.

The manufacturers worked this out and fixed it in hardware. Ring’s Battery Doorbell Plus and Wired Video Doorbell Pro shoot a square 1:1 frame at 150° × 150°; Google’s Nest Doorbell shoots 3:4 portrait. Both market it as “head to toe,” and that phrase is the actual specification you want. You trade some side-to-side view for it, which at a front door is exactly the right trade — a doorbell’s job is the doorstep, not the street.

So the first fix is free if you are still shopping: buy the tall frame, not the wide one. If you already own a 16:9 doorbell, a wedge mount that tilts it down recovers the mat, at the cost of some of the head.

The second fix is about pixel density rather than framing. Identification needs far more detail than noticing does — the European standard (DORI, EN 62676-4) puts identification at 250 pixels per metre of scene width, ten times what detection requires. A very wide lens, doorbell or otherwise, spreads its pixels thin and distorts faces at the edges. So if you want a still that identifies a stranger rather than merely proving one was there, that is a second camera with a narrower field of view, framed tightly on the path people have to walk up. If you also want a license plate, that is a third camera with its own tight view of the street — plates and faces are never the same shot.

If it happens anyway

• Report it to the retailer first. About 62% of victims get a refund or replacement, and Amazon in particular resolves most claims without much argument.
• File a police report even for a small item. It is what supports a pattern — porch theft is rarely a one-off in a neighborhood, and a cluster of reports is what gets attention.
• If USPS delivered it, report to the Postal Inspection Service as well. Different agency, different statute, meaningfully different penalties.
• Export the footage properly — the actual file, with its timestamp, covering a window either side of the delivery notification. Do not rely on the clip staying in the app; most retention is measured in days.

If you want the porch sorted before December

The honest order of operations is: stop the parcel sitting out, then light the approach, then add one camera positioned to identify rather than merely notice. Most homes we look at already have the third thing and none of the first two.

We are a licensed Utah alarm and low-voltage contractor — license #14207727-6501 — and we do this across the Wasatch Front and Back. If you have a camera already, we are happy to tell you where to move it rather than sell you another one.

After years of walking properties with homeowners and builders, we have found the whole conversation about security cameras gets simpler when you strip it back to this: a camera needs two things, power and a network. That is it. Every product on the shelf, every install we quote, every argument about wired versus wireless, comes down to how those two needs get met.

Once you see it that way, the marketing gets a lot easier to read. So here is the honest version — every way to get power and a network to a camera, what each one costs you, and which combinations we actually install on Utah homes and businesses.

First, a myth worth killing: “wireless” cameras are not wireless

When a box says wireless, it almost always means the data is wireless. The camera still needs power, and power usually means a wire. The only genuinely wire-free cameras are battery powered, and a battery is a thing you have to maintain.

So when someone says they want wireless cameras to avoid running cable, the real question is which of the two requirements they are trying to solve — and whether solving it wirelessly is worth what it costs in reliability.

The five ways to power a camera

1. PoE — one cable does both

Power over Ethernet sends power and data down a single Cat6 cable, up to about 300 feet from the switch. One cable, one termination, nothing to plug in at the camera end. If a cable can be pulled, this is what we install.

Why we prefer it: no batteries, no Wi-Fi contention, no separate power supply at the eave, and if a camera drops off you have one cable and one switch port to check. It is also the only option that scales cleanly — a twenty-camera building on PoE behaves; twenty cameras on Wi-Fi does not.

The cost: somebody has to pull the cable. In a finished house that means fishing walls and soffits. In a house under construction it is trivial, which is exactly why we push builders to rough in camera locations before drywall.

2. AC from an existing fixture — the floodlight camera trick

Floodlight cameras swap out an exterior light fixture and borrow the 120V that is already there. No new wire, no battery, and you keep the light. For a garage, a back door or a side yard that already has a fixture, it is the fastest good answer we have.

These are also a natural fit alongside exterior lighting work, since you are already in the fixture.

3. Low-voltage DC — hardwired power, wireless data

A 12V or 24V DC run from a transformer powers the camera while the video rides your Wi-Fi. It is the compromise position: you have solved power properly, and you are only gambling on the network. Common where the cable path to the camera is easy but the path back to the rack is not.

4. Battery

No wires at all. Genuinely useful for rentals, for a spot you cannot get power to, or for a camera you need up this afternoon.

What you trade: battery cameras sleep to conserve power, so they wake on motion — and waking takes a moment. You frequently get the middle of an event rather than the start of it. Cold weather makes it worse; a battery that lasts four months in September will not last four months in a Utah January. And every battery is a recurring chore, multiplied by however many cameras you own.

5. Solar

A small panel that keeps a battery camera topped up. On the right wall this genuinely works and we install them — the right wall meaning real, direct, southern exposure for a good part of the day.

The four ways to get a camera on a network

1. Ethernet

A wire back to a switch. Nothing else is as reliable, and nothing else is as boring — which, for infrastructure, is the highest compliment available. It is also the only option where twenty cameras recording 4K does not become a conversation about bandwidth. If you are already thinking about coverage, it is worth reading how we approach the network the whole property runs on.

2. Wi-Fi

Convenient, and fine for a few cameras on a good network. The failure modes are worth knowing: cameras sit outside, and the far side of a stucco or brick wall is a hostile place for a signal. Video is a constant upstream load, so a handful of Wi-Fi cameras can make the rest of the house feel slow. And a Wi-Fi camera is only as reliable as the access point nearest to it, which is often the one in the middle of the house pointing the wrong way.

If you are going to run cameras over Wi-Fi, put a real access point near them rather than hoping. That is usually a smaller job than people expect.

3. Cellular

An LTE modem at the property, or built into the camera. This is the answer for places with no internet at all — land you are about to build on, a cabin, a well house, a job site, a gate half a mile from the house.

The cost: a data plan, and a real reason to think about how much video you push. Cellular plus solar is the standard construction-site kit, and it is genuinely the only thing that works out there.

4. A wireless bridge, for outbuildings

A point-to-point radio link between two buildings — house to shop, house to barn — carrying a full network across the gap. Far better than stretching Wi-Fi and hoping, and much cheaper than trenching a conduit across a pasture. Once the bridge is up, the outbuilding gets PoE cameras like anywhere else.

The combinations you will actually be offered

What we recommend, and when we don’t

Pull cable where you can. PoE is cheaper over five years than any battery system, it records continuously instead of waking up, and it is the only approach that stays sane past a handful of cameras. On a new build it costs almost nothing to do right.

We don’t recommend it everywhere, though. If you are renting, if the camera is going somewhere you may move it, or if the wall in question would mean opening up finished ceilings for one view, battery or a floodlight camera is the sensible answer and we will tell you so.

Most properties end up mixed: PoE on the house where the cable path is clean, a floodlight camera on the detached garage, something on solar and cellular watching the gate. That is a perfectly good design, not a compromise.

The equipment side

We install and support UniFi for most residential and light commercial work, Alarm.com where cameras need to sit alongside a monitored alarm, and Verkada for commercial sites that need cloud management and AI search across many buildings. All three do PoE properly; they differ in how they store video and what the ongoing costs look like.

If you would rather see the hardware, our camera and video equipment is the same gear we install, and there is more detail on our camera systems page.

Five questions worth asking before you buy

• Is it recording all the time, or only when it wakes up? This is the real difference between a wired camera and a battery one.
• Where does the video live, and what does that cost per month? Local storage, cloud, or both.
• If it is on Wi-Fi, what is it connecting to, and where is that access point?
• If it is on a switched fixture, who might turn the switch off?
• What happens in a power cut? A camera on a UPS keeps working; a camera on a switched outlet does not.

Getting it right for your property

Camera placement matters more than camera specs — a 4K camera pointed at the wrong corner is worse than a 2K camera watching the approach. We walk the property, mark the locations, and tell you which of these power and network options actually fit each one.

If you are building, get us the plans and we will mark up camera locations before anyone hangs drywall. If your house is finished, we will find the paths that exist and be straight with you about the ones that don’t.

Get in touch or call (928) THE-PROS and we will come look at it.

It comes up on nearly every camera walkthrough, usually phrased as a worry rather than a question: “So if they cut the internet, I lose everything?”

The answer depends entirely on where your footage is being written. It is worth understanding before you buy, because it is the single decision that separates the two kinds of camera system on the market — and most people are never told which one they are being sold.

How to tell which one you have

You do not need the spec sheet. Ask three questions:

• Is there a box? A recorder — an NVR or DVR, usually in a closet, a rack or on a shelf — means local storage. No box anywhere means the footage is going somewhere else.
• Are you paying per camera, per month? Cloud storage is almost always billed that way. Local recording is not billed at all after the hardware.
• How far back can you scrub? Cloud plans usually cap you at 7, 14 or 30 days depending on tier. A local recorder holds whatever the drives hold.

The failure most people worry about is the wrong one

The scenario people picture is someone deliberately cutting a line. It happens, but it is rare, and it is not the outage you will actually experience.

What you will experience is far more ordinary. The ISP has a fault. A construction crew two streets over hits a conduit. The router needs a reboot and nobody is home. A storm takes the neighbourhood down for six hours. Those are the everyday events, and a local recorder does not notice any of them.

There is a second failure worth naming, because nobody advertises it: your upload speed. A cloud system has to push every stream out of the building continuously. Utah homes on cable frequently have generous download and thin upload — 20 or 30 Mbps up is common. Four 4K cameras uploading continuously will saturate that, and what you notice is not the cameras. It is that video calls stutter and everything else feels slow. A local recorder writes to a drive three feet away and uses none of your upload until you actually open the app.

If you are not sure what you have to work with, our speed test will show you your real upload figure. It is ad-free and stores nothing.

What local recording still needs the internet for

Being clear about this, because “works without internet” gets oversold:

• Remote viewing — watching from your phone away from home needs a connection. On site, over your own network, it works regardless.
• Push notifications — an alert to your phone has to leave the building.
• Cloud backup, if you have chosen to run it alongside local recording.
• Monitored alarm signals — though a properly specified alarm has a cellular path precisely so it does not depend on your broadband. That is a separate system from the cameras, and it should not share a single point of failure with them.

What it does not need the internet for is the part that matters after the fact: writing the footage. That keeps happening.

What we install, and why

We build local-first. Cameras wired back to a recorder in the building, footage on drives you own, remote access layered on top for convenience rather than as the foundation. If you want cloud backup as a second copy — sensible for a business, where the recorder itself could be stolen — we will add it deliberately, as redundancy rather than as the only copy.

The reason is not ideology. It is that a system whose core function depends on a monthly payment and a working ISP has two ways to stop protecting you that have nothing to do with security.

If you are weighing this up for your own property, we are happy to talk it through — that is what we do across Utah, and the equipment is yours outright either way.

It is the question that stalls more camera quotes than price does. You know roughly how many cameras you want. You have been told you need a recorder. Nobody has told you how big it should be, and the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong is either a few hundred dollars wasted or footage that has already been overwritten by the time you go looking for it.

Here is how the arithmetic actually works, so you can sanity-check any quote you are given — including ours.

Storage is a rate, not a size

A camera does not produce a file. It produces a stream, and the number that matters is its bitrate: how many megabits per second it writes. Multiply the bitrate by the number of cameras, then by the number of seconds you want to keep, and you have your storage. Everything else is detail.

The rough shape, per camera, recording continuously in H.265:

• 2MP (1080p) — around 2–4 Mbps
• 4MP — around 4–6 Mbps
• 8MP (4K) — around 8–12 Mbps

To turn that into terabytes: one camera at 4 Mbps, running all day, writes roughly 43 GB every 24 hours. Eight of those for 30 days is about 10 TB. That is the whole calculation, and it is why a “4 TB should be plenty” answer is usually wrong.

The four things that actually move the number

1. Resolution — but less than you would think

Going from 4MP to 4K roughly doubles the storage. It does not double how useful the footage is. Detail is a function of pixels on the subject, which is mostly about where the camera is mounted and what lens it has. A well-placed 4MP camera at the pinch point beats a 4K camera surveying a whole yard from the roofline, and it costs you half the drive.

2. Codec

H.265 uses roughly half the bitrate of H.264 for equivalent quality. If a quote is sized on H.264 numbers and the cameras support H.265, the recorder is likely oversized. If the reverse, you will run short.

3. Continuous versus motion-only

Recording only on motion can cut storage by 50–70% on a quiet property. It also means that whatever the analytics did not flag, you do not have. On a residential driveway that is usually a fine trade. On a commercial site with a liability exposure, it usually is not — and the moment you most want footage is the moment nobody was moving yet.

There is a middle option most people are not offered: record continuously at a low frame rate and let motion events trigger full frame rate. You keep the complete timeline and only pay full price for the parts that matter.

4. Frame rate

Most systems ship at 30fps because that is the default, not because anyone needs it. At 15fps you halve the storage and lose nothing that matters for identifying a person walking. For a licence plate on a moving car, or a cash register, you want the frames. For a back gate, you do not.

How long should you actually keep it?

The honest answer for most homes is 14 to 30 days. The thing you will go looking for — a delivery that did not arrive, a scrape on the car, a contractor’s account of what happened — you will usually go looking for within a week of it happening.

Businesses are different, and often the decision is not yours. Some insurers specify a retention period. Some industries have one written into their compliance. If you are running a licensed premises, handling cash, or storing customer property, check what you are required to keep before you size anything, because it is the one input you cannot negotiate down later.

Buy the bays, not just the drives

The mistake we see most often is not undersized storage. It is a recorder with nowhere to put more.

Drives are cheap and getting cheaper. Recorders are neither, and a two-bay unit that is full in year two means replacing the recorder to add a camera. If the system might grow — and it usually does, because the first thing people want after their cameras go in is another camera — pay for the chassis with spare bays now and half-fill it.

One more thing worth spending on: use surveillance-rated drives. A desktop drive is built to be idle most of the time. A surveillance drive is built to write continuously from several streams at once for years, and the failure rate difference over a five-year install is not subtle.

Work it out for your own system

We built a surveillance storage calculator because we got tired of doing this arithmetic on the back of estimates. Put in your camera count, resolution, frame rate, codec and how many days you want to keep, and it will give you the terabytes and a drive layout that fits an actual recorder rather than a theoretical one. It is free, there is no sign-up, and it stores nothing.

If you would rather someone just designed it properly, that is what we do. We install and service camera systems across Utah, and the equipment is yours outright — the footage lives on a drive in your building, not behind a per-camera cloud fee.