Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsDO YOUR RESEARCH! Product is mediocre at best, and the service/add-ons are worthless
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2022
My review is two part: (1) the product itself, (2) Arlo overall. In summary, the product itself is not really worth it unless you just want to be able to check in on the live feed and get motion alerts for things happening immediately in its focused area. Otherwise, expect to pay out the nose trying to get a system working the way you want it, only to find out it doesn't work the way you think it will.
The product:
Set up was easy for the most part, but I've had to delete it and "re-install" it on my account a few times when it's just completely timed out on me and stopped recording on motion events. It seemed to get better when I ended up buying an Arlo Smart Base, it hasn't needed a re-install since then. Even though I pay for the Arlo Secure Plus so I can set up custom activity zones, it ignores the zones I set up and triggers no matter where the motion is in its field of view. I like that my homes mechanical doorbell still rings when someone presses the Arlo doorbell and I love that it calls my phone anytime someone presses it. It's a bit rough to use if you need to actually talk to someone. By the time I answer, the app loads, and I begin talking the person who rang the doorbell has just about given up waiting for an answer. If you're lucky enough to catch them before they walk away there is about a 10 second delay for them so they sit there waiting for you to reply wondering if it disconnected. Not the end of the world, but given what I pay for the whole package in general it frustrates me a bit. I wish I would have looked harder at Ring, as the doorbell does not integrate well with Alexa devices.
The service:
I can't speak to what the experience is like without paying for Arlo. I imagine if you plan on using this for free, it is worthless. I wanted the full functional experience so I opted to pay the $15/mo for Arlo Secure Plus. This allowed for the ability to have 4K cloud recording, 30 days of cloud history, custom activity zones, smart (and rich notifications). The smart notifications is this product/services only redeeming quality. When motion is detected, Arlo sends you a notification letting you know if the motion is a person, animal, vehicle, or just general motion. This was really cool, at first, until it triggered a notification for something overnight that I wanted to follow up on. Unfortunately, the motion detection triggered a person prowling around, but I was not able to see all of there activity or see where they came from or where they went because the camera only recorded the motion trigger and about 30 seconds after the fact. Frustrated by this, I went to Arlo support to find out that a service option for continuous video recording (CVR) was available for $9.99/mo per camera. I figured I only really needed my main camera to be opted in to keep costs down. Well, I looked all over Arlo support and spent days, if not a few weeks e-mailing back and forth with Arlo to finally find out that the only way you can opt in to CVR is if you have an Arlo smart base. Frustrated by this, I gave in and purchased a kit that included 2 - 4k Arlo Ultra 2 cameras and a smart base. Got the smart base all set up with no problem and even opted to insert a class 10 SD card into the base of it to backup video clips. Fast forward a few months and disaster strikes again, this time for my neighbor, who asked me to see if I had captured anything. I reviewed the camera I had opted into CVR and found that I had captured the entire crime from start to finish. Then, I tried to export the video to provide it to them and law enforcement, but ran into my next big headache... there was no option on either the app or while logged in on a browser to export the video. Again, I found myself researching for an answer for an hour or so to find that the consensus was to use a third party screen capture software. This is unacceptable! My camera obviously didn't record it off a motion even because I have it set up to not go off every single time a leaf twitches on my street. So, I took a screen capture of the video and provided it to my neighbor, but seeing as it didn't really provide suspect information, it is probably worthless. Even if it had, I question whether any such evidence would be suitable for the court as I have no way of exporting it and having the metadata show when it was actually captured. A screen capture obviously will only show the time of when my screen capture occurred.
Overall, I'm incredibly disappointed because I've invested nearly $1k into all the equipment, accessories, and service just to find that it is nothing more than an overpriced system for someone far older than me who enjoys just being a nosy neighbor. If I could go back in time and avoid purchasing this I would have. Arlo doesn't seem to be in a rush to improve any of its products, so I'm not going to hold my breath for it to get better any time soon. Most of the answers to my questions I found have been asked and answered as far back as 2019, so obviously not a whole lot has improved over the years. I bought the system based on how it ranked on some of my favored technology review sites. I guess I should have dug deeper into the systems capabilities. This was my first time setting something like this up, so I really didn't know what I wanted until it was too late. Next time I'll buy a wired closed circuit system with a DVR and take the extra time fishing wire through the walls.
