Readers’ Choice 2023: The Home Security Brands People Prefer

Home security systems and security cameras, both indoors and out, provide you with peace of mind. These systems can deter potential intruders, let you check in on what’s happening while you’re away, and alert you when something malfunctions, such as a pipe bursting and flooding your basement.

But in a market flooded with great options, which home security products should you choose? To get some definitive answers, we asked thousands of PCMag readers to rate their satisfaction with the security products they use. Read on to see which brands they recommend you use to keep safe.

The Top Home Security Systems 2023

SimpliSafe has long been a leader in the home security system space, and it remains the system of choice for PCMag readers, winning our Readers’ Choice award yet again. It earns the highest ratings for security systems on nearly every measure of satisfaction. (Click any of the arrows to cycle through the categories, or bring up a menu of categories.)

SimpliSafe has won this award every year since we started surveying readers about home security products in 2018. That’s an impressive streak.

SimpliSafe’s leading competitor in the category, based on the number of responses, is Ring, which is owned by Amazon. Last year, Ring earned the same ratings as SimpliSafe on our two most important measures (overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend), but this year a gap appears once again. While Ring’s ratings are generally very good this year, SimpliSafe rates better on every measure except satisfaction with the cost of monitoring. (Only respondents who pay for monitoring are asked to rate its cost.)

Where SimpliSafe really sets itself apart from Ring is how pleased its users are with the company’s support. Although respondents rate Ring reasonably well for satisfaction with customer service and technical support, SimpliSafe’s ratings on these measures are exceptional, much like they were in 2022. And when your home security is at stake, getting the best support is paramount.

The Top Indoor Security Cameras 2023

Since its inception (as Doorbot on Shark Tank a decade ago), Ring has used video, originally from digital video doorbells, to provide peace of mind by letting its customers check in on their homes from anywhere and alerting them when cameras pick up movement. The indoor security camera market is a competitive space, but Ring’s years of video surveillance expertise pays off this year. The company receives the top ratings in satisfaction on nearly every measure in our survey, earning Ring the Readers’ Choice award for indoor security cameras for the first time.

In addition to top marks for overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend, Ring receives the highest satisfaction ratings on several other questions that we asked. The company’s best ratings come in satisfaction with ease of use, setup, and mobile control.

Ring earns the lowest ratings in the category on two measures: satisfaction with system cost and monitoring cost.

Wyze provides affordable products, and scores high marks on these measures. But there's a tradeoff here. Despite offering competitively priced home security gear, Wyze finishes with by far the lowest ratings for customer service. SimpliSafe rates best for that, but Ring is not far behind.

At the bottom of the pack for cameras is Blink, another Amazon-owned company, though it does outperform Wyze in a few areas.

The Top Outdoor Security Cameras 2023

Video is at the center of how Ring provides home security. At the time of this writing, the company had more than a dozen outdoor camera configurations. SimpliSafe, on the other hand, has one outdoor camera. If it suits your needs, great. If not, you’ll have to go elsewhere for outdoor security cameras.

Despite the different approaches to outdoor video security, the two companies tie for the highest ratings for their outdoor cameras for overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend. Those are the two measures we consider first when picking a winner. For this reason, both Ring and SimpliSafe earn our Readers’ Choice award for outside surveillance. Ring also has the top satisfaction marks from respondents for its motion detection, mobile control, and smart assistant integration. (Smart assistants are tools like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Alphabet's Google Assistant.)

Three other companies—Arlo, Blink, and Wyze—also receive the requisite minimum of responses to include in our survey results. Blink performs slightly better here than it does with indoor cameras. While its overall satisfaction rating is in the middle of the pack, it has the top rating for satisfaction with setup, ease of use, and reliability; it ties Ring’s rating for satisfaction with mobile control.

Arlo’s satisfaction ratings consistently bring up the rear. Wyze receives the highest rating on satisfaction with system cost, but it is still far behind our leaders for overall satisfaction. Clearly, price isn’t everything.

Full Results

The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for Home Security was in the field from July 24 to August 14, 2023. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read the survey methodology.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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