If you’ve ever wanted to keep an eye on your surroundings without sending data to third-party servers, you’ve probably heard of Frigate. The open-source is a popular choice as an NVR that runs locally and taps into the power of AI to detect people, cars, and more. But Frigate isn’t the only game in town. There’s another contender worth looking at. It’s called Viseron, and it’s a self-hosted camera monitoring platform that offers a polished interface, widespread hardware support, and, most importantly, it works on your local network.

Viseron is designed from the ground up to be simple, flexible, and private. There are no subscriptions to worry about, no hidden restrictions, and, of course, no cloud dependencies to worry about. Everything runs locally on your home server or NAS, including video recording and object detection. Moreover, it’s one of the easiest NVR solutions to self-host and integrate.

A simple setup with deep configuration options

A modern interface with smart features

Viseron’s setup process is extremely simple as far as Docker-based apps go. Deployments take minutes, and once deployed, you can access a web-based dashboard that looks and feels surprisingly modern as far as open-source projects go. The Typescript and React-based interface goes a long way towards making it responsive across desktop and mobile environments.

Of course, the interface is just one part of the equation. The real strength lies in how Viseron handles cameras and storage. The app can record continuously or only when motion or object detection is triggered. It’s extremely configurable. The settings extend to tiered storage, which allows users to assign different retention policies to various disks or network volumes. This lets you keep short-term or immediate footage on an SSD for quick access, and long-term archival footage can be kept on slower and larger hard drives. Like any half-decent NVR app, there’s a proper timeline view that gives you timestamped and chronological access to the timeline and makes finding specific events a breeze.

Some aspects of the app could’ve been easier, and you’d expect a graphical interface to add cameras, but keeping up with the developer and enthusiast-oriented positioning of the app, it’s not a big miss. Users can add cameras through a YAML configuration. There’s robust support here for everything from RTSP, RTSPS streams to USB cameras. If you plan to use object classification, Viseron works with hardware acceleration like Intel QuickSync and CUDA GPUs. On the flipside, if you are running it on a lower-powered NAS like a Synology NAS like mine, the app runs perfectly fine on the CPU while maintaining smooth performance. That said, it goes without saying that you’ll want a more powerful configuration for some of the advanced features.

Beyond recording, Viseron takes a component-based approach to enhancing functionality. This lets you enable things like face recognition, image classification, and license plate recognition. All detections can trigger event recordings, notifications, or MQTT messages, which can be integrated into Home Assistant. This opens up a lot of possibilities if you want to tinker around with automations.

Why it stands out from Frigate

Modular architecture with smart storage controls

Frigate is a popular choice for DIY surveillance enthusiasts for a good reason. It’s powerful, well-documented, and supports video acceleration for object classification. But despite that, Viseron brings a few advantages that make it worth trying out.

Viseron offers a broad feature set right out of the box, but hides it under a simple interface. The app includes face recognition, object classification, and more without needing add-ons. For users running a smart home setup, or even a small business, this simplified interface makes it a cinch to get up and running. Frigate, while it offers much the same, is a bit more focused on object detection and motion events.

The app’s architectural flexibility also makes it easier to adapt to your system. Viseron uses a modular component-based system, which lets you enable or disable components like detectors depending on your requirements. This way, you can deploy a simpler, lightweight motion detector for non-critical areas like indoors and reduce AI overhead dramatically. As mentioned earlier, the tiered recording system is also great for handling storage and retention on multiple hard drives or NAS systems. Frigate, while flexible, doesn’t make it easy to assign specific cameras and media to specific storage roles. It’s just that much easier to fine-tune where your storage clips will go, how long they will stay, and when they will rotate out.

A polished, privacy-first NVR that’s easy to recommend

For a project that’s entirely open-source, Viseron offers a high degree of polish, making it an easy recommendation. The web interface is responsive and sports a timeline view that loads quickly. Moreover, configuration management is built in, so you don’t even have to drop into Docker configuration to make quick changes.

Self-hosting isn’t for everyone, but a self-hosted NVR solution is easy to recommend because of the privacy and flexibility offered by the open-source software. Viseron hits the sweet spot for that flexibility. It’s got all the essential features like continuous recording, AI-powered object detection, and a clean interface without locking you into a cloud ecosystem. Frigate remains a great option, but Viseron’s blend of simplicity and customization makes it a compelling choice.

Viseron

Viseron is an open-source, self-hosted NVR solution that supports AI-based object classification.