Are Video Doorbells Worth It?

The short answer

Buy one. A video doorbell is the cheapest piece of smart-home hardware that changes something every day rather than once a month: you see who is at the door before you open it, you know when a parcel has actually arrived, and you can answer the door from the office or the supermarket. Of the three doorbells we cover, the one to buy for most homes is the eufy Video Doorbell E340, because it does all of that and records to its own built-in storage with no monthly fee.

The question worth more of your attention than “is it worth it?” is which one. These three doorbells differ by a factor you will pay for every month for as long as you own the thing — whether footage is yours or rented — and by whether your door has the wiring the model expects.

What a doorbell does that a camera does not

A doorbell camera is not a cheaper security camera. It is a camera pointed at the single most useful square meter of your property, at head height, with a two-way intercom and a button people voluntarily press.

That combination produces three things no yard camera does. The first is footage you will actually look at: deliveries, visitors, the person who left the gate open. The second is a conversation — telling a courier to leave it round the back is worth more on an average Tuesday than any amount of night vision. The third is packages: Ring publishes package and person detection as features of its wired doorbell, and eufy’s E340 takes a different route to the same problem with a second camera aimed at the doorstep rather than the visitor.

What a doorbell cannot do is cover the rest of the property. If the driveway, garage or back garden is the thing you are worried about, a doorbell is the wrong purchase and our camera rankings are the right page — starting with how many cameras you actually need.

The running cost, which is the real decision

Here is where the three doorbells separate, in each maker’s own words.

Ring is explicit about what works without a plan: Live View, motion alerts, two-way talk, motion zones and Alexa. What a plan adds is cloud video history, snapshots and person detection, with Ring publishing up to 180 days of video playback on its paid tiers. In practice that means a Ring doorbell with no plan tells you someone is there and lets you look and talk — but keeps no clip for you to watch afterwards, and there is no memory-card slot to fall back on.

eufy’s E340 records to 8GB of local storage built into the doorbell, expandable with a eufy HomeBase, with no monthly fee. There is an optional cloud plan; nothing stops working without it.

Wyze sits in between and is the one to check before you buy. Wyze offers a free event tier and a paid Cam Plus, and its Video Doorbell Pro pages describe Cam Plus features prominently. Our registry entry flags its recording options as less clear-cut than eufy’s local approach, which is a deliberately cautious reading rather than a criticism of the hardware.

The three doorbells compared

Read the first two rows and the ranking writes itself for anyone who dislikes subscriptions. Read the third and fourth rows if your door has no wiring, because that is the other way this decision gets made for you.

Will it even fit your door?

This is the practical trap, and the makers are clear enough that you can check before ordering.

Wired models need a real transformer. Ring publishes the requirement for the Wired Doorbell Pro: hardwired at 16 to 24 VAC or 24 VDC, 10 to 40 VA maximum, 50/60Hz, and explicitly no halogen or garden-lighting transformers. If your house has an old mechanical chime, that is usually fine; if it has no doorbell wiring at all, a wired doorbell means an electrician.

Wire-free models remove the problem and add a battery. Wyze publishes that the Video Doorbell Pro installs wired or wire-free, mounted with screws or a screw-free adhesive plate, and rates its two non-removable 3250 mAh cells at three to six months of normal use. It also ships a dual-band Wi-Fi extender chime in the box, which Wyze says stays connected to both the doorbell and your Wi-Fi — a neat answer to the real complaint about battery doorbells, which is sluggish notifications. The eufy E340 can be wired or battery-powered, so it fits either kind of door.

For the full version of this — chime types, transformers, what to do with no existing wiring — read do video doorbells need existing wiring? Renters should start with smart home for renters, as the adhesive-plate option is the one that keeps a landlord happy.

The honest case against

Three reasons to pass, stated as plainly as the reasons to buy.

Notification fatigue. A doorbell on a busy street with wide motion zones will buzz your phone all day until you narrow the zones. Every brand lets you, and every brand ships with it too wide.

It is another camera on another account. The FTC publishes consumer guidance on securing home security cameras for a reason: a doorbell is an internet-connected camera pointed at your front door, and it needs a strong unique password and two-factor authentication. If you will not do that, buy the model that keeps footage locally.

It does not replace a lock or an alarm. A doorbell tells you who is there. It does not keep them out and it does not call anyone. If what you want is an alarm, start with best home security systems instead; if you want to let people in remotely, that is a smart lock.

Which one to buy

Three doorbells, three different households, all from our video doorbell ranking.

If the subscription question is what is holding you up, read do video doorbells need a subscription? next — it goes brand by brand through what you keep when you stop paying. And if you want the doorbell and the lock to work together, the Alexa lock picks are the locks that join the same routine.