SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro Review

A Look at Design

SimpliSafe equipment typically offers a simple, minimalistic aesthetic, and the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro is no different. It has an elliptic form factor, which is typical for video doorbells, a clean and neat white face with off-white grayish body, and a blue LED light around its doorbell button that stands out subtly and adds to the modern yet simple design.

In addition, a vast majority of homes in the United States meet the wiring requirements of the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro: An existing doorbell wiring with an eight to 14-volt AC transformer.

When it comes to hardiness, the doorbell is weatherproof and withstands temperatures between 14 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, although some users have reportedly used it in temperatures below zero and it worked just fine. Still, if you live in an area where the temperature drops below zero during winters, we’d advise getting a more rugged video doorbell.

Hooking up the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro

SimpliSafe takes absolute pride in its easy-to-install wireless security products, but as we mentioned earlier, the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro requires hardwiring. That makes it slightly more difficult to install than other SimpliSafe products, but there’s a good reason why SimpliSafe chose a hardwired doorbell over a wireless, battery-powered one.

Before we talk about that, let’s discuss the setup procedures. First off, we hardwired the doorbell to our existing doorbell setup. Thankfully, our home’s wiring was supported, but if yours isn’t compatible, you’ll need a 16-volt AC transformer to hook up SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro to your home.

The process was painless. We followed the instructions step by step, and within minutes, the video doorbell was on. Next, we downloaded the SimpliSafe app and connected the doorbell. All in all, it took us about five minutes to connect the doorbell to the app, and the entire setup process lasted about 15 minutes.

The setup process would have been a lot simpler if SimpliSafe had used a battery-powered doorbell, so why did it not? There’s a pretty good reason. Battery-powered doorbells are easier to set up, but their batteries need to be replaced or charged every few months or so. With the SimpliSafe doorbells, it’s a one-and-done process.

Despite the slightly more complex setup process, the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro is in line with SimpliSafe’s goal of simple home security. And if you’re really worried about setting up the system, keep in mind that SimpliSafe offers optional professional monitoring on-the-cheap.

SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro on the Daily

Like many security brands with alarm systems, the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro worked harmoniously with our SimpliSafe security system which included a base station, wireless keypad, entry, motion, and glass break sensors, the SimpliCam indoor camera, panic button, key fobs, and siren. We go over each of these components in detail in our SimpliSafe security system review, but as for the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro, it mainly collaborated with the sensors. Any time one of the sensors was triggered in our home, the Video Doorbell Pro would immediately start recording.

That’s one of the advantages of going with a video doorbell that integrates with a security system rather than a standalone video doorbell. Because it can detect signals from other sensors, the SimpliSafe doorbell is able to use cues from them to decide when to record. With a standalone doorbell, your recording options are limited to when someone presses the doorbell or when the camera detects motion.

Let’s take a closer look at the key features of the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro and how it improved our home security and daily lives.

• Video: As we said, 1080p is the standard among security cameras and video doorbells. The SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro has HDR as well, so the footage looked better lighting-wise. Plus, with the pan and zoom feature, we pinned down the smallest details. Finally, the 162-degree field of view gave us a wider vision of our street, which is usually jam-packed with cars and people.

• Audio: Two-way audio is vital to any video doorbell. It means you can hear the person at your front door, and you can talk to them through the doorbell’s speakers. Basically, two-way talk allows video doorbells to function as intercoms, and that’s exactly what the SimpliSafe doorbell did.
• Night vision: SimpliSafe utilizes infrared night vision. This type of night vision infrared LEDs, which emit invisible infrared lights that can only be detected by the camera’s infrared sensor. The resulting image is black-and-white, as you can see in the picture below. And while the image seems bright, it was actually very dark outside when we took this photo.

• Storage: SimpliSafe has been improving its cloud storage options in recent years. Currently, it offers two plans. For around $10 a month, we got unlimited storage on up to five cameras. That’s not bad.Here’s the thing, though: For the same price, you can get cloud storage for unlimited Ring video doorbells and security cameras. SimpliSafe isn’t expensive by any means, but it’s also not the cheapest option when it comes to cloud storage.
• Person detection: Suffice to say, we love video doorbells that have artificial intelligence. We don’t want to be bombarded by useless notifications alerting us of cars passing by. Also, we don’t want to know every time one of the neighborhood cats strolls by.
  The SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro features two sensors for person detection: a heat signature to distinguish people from animals and a sensor to detect human forms rather than animal and car forms. That means that we got notified only when our doorbell detected people, which freed us from pointless notifications.

Monitoring & Storage Breakdown

SimpliSafe offers two storage and monitoring plans.

Of course, you could monitor live feeds yourself for free, plus, if there’s someone at your door, you’ll get a notification so you can fire up the app and watch live. The video doorbell won’t record anything, though, without a cloud plan. As we mentioned earlier, cloud recording costs $10 per month for up to five cameras.

But the best option for SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro users with a SimpliSafe security system is the Interactive plan that costs $27.99 per month. Now, before the price puts you off, hear us out. The Interactive plan includes professional monitoring of the SimpliSafe system (but not cameras and doorbells), which means it’ll alert SimpliSafe’s partner monitoring center of emergencies. You’ll also get police, medical, and fire emergency dispatch. On top of that, you’ll get cloud storage for 10 cameras. And last but not least, it includes video verification, which utilizes your SimpliSafe cameras to speed up police response.

SimpliSafe is actually focusing on a new feature called Fast Protect™ Technology, which is an expansion of the video verification feature. Whenever there’s an alert, as long as you’re on the Interactive plan, SimpliSafe will use your cameras’ live feed to verify the alarm and speed up police response.

Two new features were recently added to Fast Protect™, namely, alert texts and critical alarms. The former utilizes text messaging to instantly alert users to potential emergencies and give them an efficient way to confirm or cancel alarms. The second feature, critical alarms, ensures that homeowners get important alerts from SimpliSafe on their phones, even if their smartphones are in silent or Do Not Disturb mode. If the user opts in, the SimpliSafe app bypasses those modes to get important alerts pushed through.

One potential downside of SimpliSafe is that it lacks local recording. It won’t be able to send anything to the cloud when your internet is down. And even though SimpliSafe’s security system has cellular backup, the doorbell can’t use this to send clips to the cloud. That’s one thing to keep in mind.

Another thing to note is that SimpliSafe’s cloud plans tend to run a bit pricier than some of the top options like Ring. Roughly $10 per month from SimpliSafe only gets you cloud storage for up to five cameras, while a similarly-priced subscription from Ring will get you cloud storage for unlimited cameras.

Still, SimpliSafe’s pricing isn’t bad at all. And if you’re an existing SimpliSafe security system user with a subscription to the Interactive plan, you can add the video doorbell and enjoy cloud recording features at no additional cost.

SimpliSafe Customer Support

We dread contacting customer support for any reason, but connecting with SimpliSafe representatives wasn’t as bad as we thought. Before that, though, we should mention that there are a number of ways we sought answers for any questions or issues we ran into while using our SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro.

The company offers phone support, forums, email contact forms, user manuals, and a help center. All of these provided useful information. A quick Google search also helped us navigate around SimpliSafe’s website with links that directed us to its support pages.

What we found most helpful when we called a SimpliSafe customer service representative was the extended hours, which lasted until midnight EST. For those late nights when we’d come home and needed immediate responses, we were grateful for SimpliSafe’s late hours of operation.

The representative we spoke to, Dave, answered our questions — like why the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro stopped streaming one time. Dave clarified that if the LED color was yellow, it meant that a firmware update was in progress. That explained everything. He communicated patiently and didn’t sound the least bit tired during our 11:15 PM phone call.

While it took some time to get connected with Dave, we were satisfied overall with our experience.

SimpliSafe Home Security App Experience

Recent data reports indicate that people use mobile apps 90 percent of the time over mobile sites,2 so it’s no surprise that many home security brands have created their own mobile apps to complement their products.

With the SimpliSafe Home Security app, we saw live footage of our front porch. While there was a little bit of lag, we panned and zoomed in, and the video quality remained crisp. There were two simple features with the live video: record and microphone. We recorded and saved our footage to the event history to review later. As for the microphone, we just had to tap on the little icon to speak to any visitors or delivery folks at our front door.

One little qualm we have with the app was that it wasn’t very robust. There were very few settings we could play with, although we were able to adjust the motion detection sensitivity, check the Wi-Fi signal on our video doorbell, and adjust a few other settings.

On the bright side, it was the same app we used to control and access our SimpliSafe home security system. It certainly made it easier to manage our home security.

Video Review

Need a visual of our experience with the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro? Check out our SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro video review below.