Reolink Doorbell PoE Review: 2K, RTSP, No Subscription

The Reolink Doorbell PoE is the cheapest serious entry in the subscription-free doorbell category, and at around £90 it sits well below the UniFi Protect G4 (~£200) and the Ring Pro 2 (£230 plus the obligatory Protect plan). The relevant question is not whether it can record a delivery driver — every doorbell at this price can — but whether it integrates with the way you actually run your home. If you self-host video on Home Assistant, Frigate or a Synology NVR, this is the easiest answer in 2026. If you do not, the trade-offs start to show.

The Reolink Doorbell PoE has one significant idea behind it: replace the entire cloud-doorbell stack with local hardware you already own. There is no Reolink Cloud subscription that unlocks features the device should have shipped with. The doorbell streams to RTSP or ONVIF clients, records to its own microSD card, and exposes a person-detection signal that runs on the device itself rather than in a cloud GPU pool. Add a £20 microSD card and you have a doorbell that records continuously, detects people, and shows up in whichever recording stack you use — for the entire life of the hardware.

The hardware itself is a 5 MP (2K) sensor in a 4:3 orientation rather than the typical 16:9. That sounds like a niche detail until the first delivery driver arrives with a parcel by their feet and you can see both their face and the parcel without changing zones. The PoE version powers from a single Ethernet cable using an 802.3af switch or injector — there is also a separate Wi-Fi variant, but it loses the reliability advantage that makes PoE worth doing.

At doorbell distance — roughly arm's-length to two metres for the typical face shot, three to six metres for the porch and street — 2K is the sweet spot. 1080p doorbells still produce usable footage but you lose the ability to crop in on a number plate or a partially obscured face. 4K doorbells exist (Aqara G4 Pro, some Eufy units) but waste most of the sensor: the lens distortion at close range and the wide-angle view make extra pixels go into peripheral mush rather than usable detail.

The 4:3 aspect is the more interesting choice. A traditional 16:9 doorbell crops out either the visitor's face or the parcel at their feet, depending on how high the unit is mounted. Reolink's portrait-ish view shows both at typical mounting heights. The IR night-vision sensor reaches about five metres before the image grades to noise — fine for porch monitoring, less useful if you need to see who is at the gate of a long driveway. There is no spotlight or full-colour night mode on this unit; both are available on the more recent Reolink Wi-Fi doorbell but not the PoE model.

This is where the Reolink earns the recommendation. The doorbell exposes two RTSP streams (main and sub) on documented URLs of the form rtsp://[user]:[pass]@[ip]:554/h264Preview_01_main. Frigate, Blue Iris, Synology Surveillance Station, Shinobi and ZoneMinder all discover and record the streams without any reverse-engineering or custom add-ons. The ONVIF Profile S support means motion events are emitted on the network so the NVR can flag relevant clips rather than recording 24 hours of porch.

For Home Assistant, Reolink ships a first-party integration that exposes the live stream, motion sensors, person-detection signal, two-way audio and a dozen configuration entities. It is one of the more complete doorbell integrations in the Home Assistant ecosystem — the only competitor that comes close is UniFi Protect, and UniFi only works if you have already invested in a UniFi NVR. The microSD-card option works either alongside or instead of an NVR. A 256 GB card holds roughly four to six weeks of motion-triggered clips depending on busy your porch is.

The Reolink app is the weakest part of the package. It is functional — push notifications arrive, clips play back, settings are accessible, sharing works — but it lacks the polish of Ring's or UniFi Protect's. Notification latency is in the one-to-three-second range from motion to phone, which is a touch behind Ring's sub-second alerts. The motion-zone editor is a low-resolution grid rather than a polygon drawing tool, which makes excluding the road or a pavement more fiddly than it should be.

The mitigation is simple: if you are buying this doorbell, you are almost certainly also running Home Assistant or a real NVR, both of which provide better notification routing than Reolink's app. The app becomes a setup tool and a fallback rather than the daily-driver interface.

Alexa and Google Home both work but feel bolted-on rather than first-party. The Alexa skill announces motion to Echo devices and can show the live feed on a Show; the Google integration is more limited and lacks two-way audio on most Nest displays. There is no native HomeKit support — the cleanest way to land the doorbell in HomeKit is via Home Assistant's HomeKit Bridge, which works well but is an extra moving part.

For Matter households, the Reolink does not yet expose itself as a Matter device. This may change with a future firmware — Reolink has signalled Matter support is on its roadmap — but at time of writing the cleanest cross-platform option remains Home Assistant in the middle.

Installation is straightforward for anyone comfortable running an Ethernet cable. The doorbell ships with a wedge mount, a flush mount and a corner-angle bracket, which covers most UK frontdoor setups. PoE power means a single cable runs from a network closet, garage or under-stairs switch out to the front door — no separate power adapter, no transformer. If the existing wired-doorbell run from chime to door uses old bell wire, you can pull a Cat5e or Cat6 through the same hole if there is enough slack.

The mechanical chime side is the one rough edge. If you want the doorbell to ring an existing bell, you need to either keep the 12-24V chime wiring in place alongside the Ethernet run, or use Reolink's small powered chime (sold separately, around £20). PoE-only installs without any chime work fine — motion events fire on the network and any Home Assistant or NVR-driven automation can play a chime through a smart speaker.