Eufy vs Reolink vs Aqara Video Doorbells (UK 2026)

Eufy, Reolink and Aqara each take a different route to the same destination: a smart video doorbell with no mandatory subscription and somewhere to store recordings that isn't a company cloud. This Eufy vs Reolink vs Aqara doorbell comparison weighs all three on the things that actually matter to UK smart-home buyers - local storage, RTSP, HomeKit, package detection and AI features - and points each kind of household at the right pick.

If you want a single sentence: Eufy is the easiest mainstream choice, Reolink is the self-hoster's friend, and Aqara is for Apple Home households that need wireless installation.

Affiliate disclosure: some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Our pick order isn't influenced by which programmes pay best - it's based on the criteria we set out below.

All three of these doorbells solve the same headline problem - they record video and tell you someone is at the door without billing a monthly fee. The interesting questions are about everything that surrounds that.

We weighted five dimensions: local storage (is the footage truly yours?), RTSP and ONVIF (does it work with the open NVR ecosystem?), HomeKit support (does it land in Apple Home with end-to-end-encrypted clips?), package and people detection (does it usefully spot what's at the door?), and AI features (face recognition, parcel alerts, smart filtering). We also took a pragmatic view on UK availability, app quality and how each plays with the wider smart-home stack you might already own.

Pricing notes use UK RRP at time of writing - discounts move week to week, and all three regularly drop 15-25% in sales windows. We've also assumed you want to avoid recurring fees; if you're open to a subscription, the calculus shifts and Ring or Google Nest re-enter the picture.

This is the headline question for buyers who looked at Ring or Nest and didn't like the answer.

The Reolink PoE is the most flexible - a microSD card inside the doorbell takes up to 256 GB, and footage can equally well stream to any Reolink NVR or a third-party recorder that speaks RTSP or ONVIF. Frigate users will be at home immediately.

The Eufy E340 stores around 8 GB on the doorbell itself, with a much larger pool available on the optional Eufy HomeBase 3. There's no microSD slot on the doorbell, but the HomeBase is a tidy way to keep months of motion clips on local disk rather than in the Eufy cloud.

The Aqara G4's clever trick is the chime that ships in the box: it's both a Zigbee hub and a microSD card holder. Recordings - including HomeKit Secure Video clips that haven't been routed to iCloud - land on a card inside the chime, on the same household network as the camera itself. That kept-in-the-house guarantee is reassuring even if the management story is less open than Reolink's.

If you've already invested in Home Assistant, Frigate, Blue Iris, Synology Surveillance Station or a UniFi Protect setup, this is the section that decides the comparison for you.

Only the Reolink PoE ships native RTSP and ONVIF Profile S. That means the camera shows up in your NVR as a normal IP camera - no shims, no cloud bouncing, no broken integrations after a firmware update. Frigate can run its own object detection on the stream, push events into Home Assistant and skip every Reolink cloud feature entirely.

The Eufy E340 has no official RTSP support. Community Home Assistant integrations exist (most route through eufy-security-ws and a WebRTC bridge), but Eufy has tightened encryption rules over the past 18 months and these integrations have been broken - and then unbroken - several times. They're usable today, but you're tracking a moving target.

The Aqara G4 is the most closed of the three. There's a community Home Assistant integration that talks to the Aqara cloud, but it's not a substitute for RTSP, and Aqara has not signalled any plan to open up native streaming. If your reason for buying a no-subscription doorbell is to run it through Frigate, Aqara is the wrong choice.

Two of the three doorbells support HomeKit Secure Video out of the box. The Eufy E340 and the Aqara G4 both appear in the Home app as cameras with full HKSV, end-to-end-encrypted clips routed via iCloud and Apple's own people, animal, vehicle and parcel detection running on a HomeKit hub (an Apple TV, a HomePod or an iPad). For Apple-centric households this is the way to keep AI features without paying anyone a monthly fee.

The Reolink PoE doesn't speak HomeKit at all. Workarounds exist - Scrypted is the most reliable bridge for getting a non-HKSV camera into the Home app - but it's a project. If HomeKit is non-negotiable, narrow the field to Eufy and Aqara.

The practical split between the two HomeKit options is form factor and ecosystem. The Eufy wins on visible-doorstep coverage thanks to the dual-camera design; the Aqara wins if you already own three Aqara plugs and a P2 sensor and want them all in one app.

All three doorbells can tell a person from a moving leaf. The interesting question is what happens once the person leaves a box on the step.

The Eufy E340 is built for this scenario. Its second downward-facing camera watches the doormat after the courier walks away, with a delivery-tracking mode that keeps recording while a parcel is present and pings you when one disappears. None of the others have a hardware solution for the same problem.

The Reolink PoE uses its 4:3 head-to-toe sensor to see further down than typical 16:9 doorbells, which catches most parcels on the step at the cost of a slightly compressed wide view. Person detection runs on-device and is reliable; package detection per se is not a dedicated feature.

The Aqara G4 piggybacks on HomeKit Secure Video for package detection, which means it inherits Apple's classifier rather than a first-party one. That's a perfectly fine outcome - Apple's parcel detection is competent - but it does mean you only get the feature on iOS 17 or later, and only when you have an HKSV-compatible Apple hub.

Of the three, the Aqara G4 is the only one with first-party on-device face recognition - recognised faces are learned and stored on the chime hub, not in the cloud. For households that want "Dad's home" automations without handing biometric data to a vendor, it's a quietly excellent feature.

The Eufy E340 exposes its AI smarts (face recognition, family member detection, smart event filtering) behind an optional Eufy Security subscription. The core motion and person detection works locally; the named-face automations and smart timeline summaries are paywalled.

The Reolink PoE takes a different approach: ship reliable person, vehicle and animal detection on the device for free, and let advanced users plug a Frigate or Blue Iris instance into the RTSP feed if they want anything fancier. There's no first-party face recognition; if you need it, you build it.

Approximate UK RRP at the time of writing: Reolink Video Doorbell PoE around £90, Aqara Video Doorbell G4 around £119, Eufy E340 around £200. All three drop 15-25% in Black Friday and Prime Day windows; the Reolink has the steadiest direct-from-Reolink pricing and the Eufy moves the most on Amazon. None of them require a subscription to keep working - if a future firmware update changes that, this comparison gets rewritten.