Monthly subscription fees keep climbing while your footage gets stored on someone else’s servers, but Ugreen’s SynCare platform eliminates both headaches. The NAS hardware company just unveiled its first smart home security ecosystem at CES 2025, promising 24/7 local recording without the subscription treadmill that’s made Ring and Nest feel more like rent-to-own schemes.
Four Cameras, One Local Brain
The SynCare lineup centers on intelligent devices that record everything to your own hardware.
The system includes:
- 4K video doorbell with head-to-toe framing
- Indoor cameras with pan-tilt tracking
- Weather-rated outdoor model with optical zoom
- Central Smart Display hub
All devices connect through your home network to Ugreen’s NASync NAS units, transforming your storage box into the neighborhood watch captain. The outdoor camera handles perimeter monitoring while indoor models track pets and people with multimodal AI recognition.
Behavior Recognition Beyond Basic Motion
SynCare promises to distinguish between delivery drivers and lingering strangers using local AI processing.
Rather than flooding your phone with generic motion alerts, the system claims to understand context—recognizing when someone’s loitering versus dropping off packages, or when your cat knocked over a plant versus an actual break-in attempt. The UltraColor Night Vision technology provides clearer identification footage, while encrypted storage keeps everything on your NASync rather than Amazon’s servers. Cross-camera awareness means the doorbell and outdoor units can correlate events for smarter notifications.
The Subscription-Free Reality Check
Promising features meet uncertain timelines and undisclosed pricing in Ugreen’s ambitious debut.
Before you ditch Ring entirely, consider the catches:
- Pricing remains undisclosed
- Launch isn’t until the second half of 2026
- You’ll need compatible Ugreen NAS hardware to unlock the full experience
- HomeKit and Google Home integration are mentioned, but certification details stay fuzzy
Claims about reduced false alarms and superior AI accuracy sound compelling, but they remain unproven until independent testing validates the marketing promises.
The subscription fatigue plaguing smart home security has created an opening for local-first alternatives. Whether Ugreen can deliver on its privacy-focused vision depends on execution details we won’t see for months.
