This camera (although cheaper than most) has just as good quality as my other monitor and I can see her whole crib and then some! But we read multiple complaints in app reviews about the app crashing or being generally unreliable, and we were concerned about the company’s potentially lackadaisical approach to security. Tech reporting has been her main beat for 10 years, but she has branched out into covering baby gear since becoming a parent, which has also made her obsessed with trying every packaged toddler snack she can find.

The camera provides a colorful night light and a clear night vision to make sure you are always aware of what is happening even at night. To help protect your account, the Nanit Pro requires two-factor authentication when you set it up for the first time on a device. Thanks to the split-screen system, you can see two rooms at the same time and monitor two of your children on one screen. But you cannot download motion- or sound-triggered clips or get sleep summaries, as you can with the Nanit Pro.Any device that you connect to the internet (from connected refrigerators to app-controlled lights) should be secured to prevent people from invading your privacy, but that task can feel daunting if working with security settings is outside your comfort zone—and even if you’ve secured your devices, data breaches can still happen.

Plus, we like that the included white noise, lullabies, and night-lights can remain useful into the toddler years and beyond. One nice feature of the parent monitor is that the volume indicator lights up with noise detection, so you can turn it quite low but keep it in your line of sight for, say, naptime. And the VM5254 produces a considerably smaller field of view than our other picks, which can feel limiting in comparison.

We played a story podcast on low to judge which audio monitors clearly transmitted very quiet sounds, even from a walk down the block.

But if you’re uncomfortable with the possibility of having to do some troubleshooting or extra maintenance on your own network or within your camera’s app, you should stick with a local-video monitor. Whereas the Nanit Pro has an 8-foot cord for the floor-stand model and a 14-foot cord for the wall-mount model, this VTech monitor comes with a cord that’s only 6 feet 6 inches long.inch, split-screen display has intuitive shortcut buttons for remotely panning the camera from side to side and tilting up and down, as well as for controlling the unit’s night-light and sound-machine settings. Aside from that major pain, we’ve seen multiple reviewer comments noting regular app glitches and video-loading issues, although we didn’t experience those problems personally.