Ring doorbell, or alternatives

Our old, basic wireless doorbell setup has just about dinged it's last dong. My wife suggested getting something like a Ring doorbell as she'll soon be moving into her new office in the garden room we're building at the moment. Our front door faces onto a reasonably busy street so there's a bit of passing car and pedestrian traffic so we'd want something that won't notify us to all of that.

Are Ring the best available or are there others we want to look at?

Thanks for that. Can the Reolink doorbell record to third-party devices (e.g. an existing home NAS) or does it have to be something from within their ecosystem? How quick do you get the notification when someone's at the door/presses the bell?

Sorry to hear about your MIL.

Poor notification response time is a deal-breaker for us, the main driver for looking at these is because it'll take my wife a bit longer to get to the door if she's in her garden office.

When you say local storage, do you mean an internal SD card? Some external thing like a NAS? What's the notification response time like with Eufy doorbells?

In large part that was what put me off a Ring or Blink doorbell. Also wasn't keen on the Nest option because I'm not sure I want Google knowing even more about us either.

So six months in and this post has not aged well. The Arlo is a flaky piece of st. When the doorbell is pressed, it's supposed to come through to the phone as a video call. This mostly does happen but sometimes not until several minutes later. Regardless of when it does come through the video never works, only sound. I've tried Arlo tech support umpteen times now and the best I got was a canned autoresponse email telling me to try a factory reset on the doorbell, but not explaining how. I figured it out and it made bugger all difference. The support case I opened and was told I'd hear from an agent within 1 to 2 business days remains unanswered three weeks later.

Anyone managed to get this thing to work properly? Failing that, any trick to getting support from Arlo?

Well I spent the better part of an hour on the phone to Arlo tech support this morning and they're replacing the doorbell unit. Will see how this goes.

Questions for those with the Reolink doorbells - I take it they can only record to their own brand NVRs, i.e. not to any old home NAS or similar? Regards Reolink Cloud, I presume the doorbell can integrate with that, record there etc. and still send notification to your phone when someone presses the doorbell?

Arlo support are just about useless, they've still not replaced the device (as promised weeks ago) and are now claiming it's a firmware issue that engineering are "aware of but have no ETA for any possible fix". I'm about to start pushing for a refund as it's basically never worked as promised since we bought it.

Good to know, thanks - I'd been holding out on switching my Fitbit across to Google (in vain really, I know). I'll have a look though.

Also keen to hear about that if anyone has one of these.

On my phone (Pixel 7a, Android 14) when the doorbell is pressed about 75% of the time I just get a popup notification saying someone has pressed the doorbell. Tapping that does absolutely nothing. What's supposed to happen is a video call comes to the phone, this happens about 20% of the time. Remaining 5%, nothing happens at all. When the video call does come through and I answer it, I get the audio OK but just a black screen with a never-ending spinning circle like it's trying but unable to connect the video.

The same thing happened on the app on my wife's iPhone until quite recently, but that seems to work OK now. Arlo are claiming it's a firmware issue, which I suspect is bks because otherwise it would affect both devices. At one point they blamed our wifi, until I took the device into the same room as the router and it behaved exactly the same way.

Their tech support is extremely slow and not very good at all. Besides the above issues, the app is flaky, unintuitive and does almost nothing without a paid subscription. Whole thing has just been a stshow really, first and definitely last purchase from Arlo.