Selfhosted

For non cloud cams, someone posted here a while back about thingno firmware, takes cheap cams off the cloud. Works great on a wyze cam and was a gamechanger for me. Sttrroonngglllyyy recommend

Frigate + Reolink (or actually Frigate-approved cams)

Slightly off topic and something I read from somewhere else, but make sure whatever you use can write the date & time onto the camera images, otherwise it isn't usable for any police / insurance claims.

I'd guess all systems do this now, but just wanted it to be on your checklist of features.

If the camera doesn't do it, then the storage server must.

(And make sure the clock is sync'd to something 😉)

Reolink cameras are self-hosted. You don’t have to have an account in their app, and nothing is synced to the cloud. It’s all stored locally. They’re expensive cameras by comparison, but a. they’re really high quality, and b. they’re not subsidized by subscription fees.

This is maybe controversial, but I love the Ubiquiti security stuff. Cameras (interior and exterior) doorbells, etc, it's all great. Pricey, but you get what you pay for.

And the data can stay local or be accessible via their services.

I chose to go local only, grabbed their UNVR and populated it with 4x 2TB drives and it has enough space to handle 7 cameras HD history for about a month.

I have a Reolink PoE camera. It works fine. As far as I can tell, it only uses the internet to check for updates and set the time, but I have it blocked off anyway. Home Assistant was actually causing it to check for updates, too, so that got disabled.
I don't record, so I can't help you there.
I will say that is a pain to get Home Assistant to display real-time video instead of a slide show.

Frigate is popular.

I used to use ZoneMinder, it worked well, but you must be very familiar with onvif, primary/secondary channels, and key frames for it to work well.

I only switched to frigate because of the person/animal detection. It's ok, but it does need some polish in a few areas like event retention, and it could stand some more approachable documentation.

Any cam with an rtsp stream is fine. Host frigate on your server point it to the cams you can get audio and video and object detection pretty easily. I also recommend taking an extra step and creating a firewall rule to block the cams' inbound/outbound internet traffic.

Dahua and Hikvision have great cameras but of course you shouldn't trust them. Block them at the firewall. I bought mine a few years ago and preferred Hikvision for its better built in webserver for initial configuration.

On the hosting side you run Frigate, Zoneminder or BlueIris (Windows) to control the cameras and record their streams.

For hardware, anything that can provide a local rtsp stream is a good place to start. I run cheap and cheerful mix of tapo, unbranded and homebrew esp32 cams. Offload the motion/object detection and alerts to something that can pull in the feeds, and isolate the cams to local network only.

WiFi usually ok, but at least hardwire the power to save future grief.

Using frigate to manage mine, which is running under Homeassistant - another project worth looking up.

A few images, featuring Freddie the visitor:

Make sure any cameras you get are ONVIF compatible. That'll give you the widest usability.

And while it's great to be self-hosted, I've never found anything as good as BlueIris for camera software, even if it does cost $50/yr. I run it in a Dockurr/windows container, there's a few projects out there that make Dockur easier to set up.

I found out reolink cameras have an official integration partnership with home assistant. I just installed my front door camera.

Can we pin one of these posts? The same thing gets asked even few days and the answers don't change nearly that frequently

I have Amcrest PoE cameras hooked to an Amcrest NVR for 24/7 recording and also Frigate running separately tied to Home Assistant to record clips and send notifications when people are out front/back of my house. It all works really well thus far after about a year of use.

When I needed this I reached for whatever generic rtmp cameras were well rated. Blocked them from external access (including outgoing!) at the firewall level and used Zoneminder and some custom scripts to monitor.

I tried to use Shinobi as my PVR for a while but dealt with a lot of usability and stability issues. Switching to Frigate has been much better. Configuration can be a bit difficult but it's rock solid and really great. Plus the home assistant integration is top notch. I've had a lot of luck with Amcrest cameras and also managed to use a cheap Tapo camera within my setup.

Gonna throw in another Reolink recommendation. I use Blue Iris as my NVR and have both that and the Reolink integrations in Home Assistant for motion notifications and lighting control. The cameras are durable (even in my very cold temps like -30C) and have really good image quality. If you don't have an NVR or Home Assistant, the built-in motion detection and app is still pretty good and you can just pop an SD card in for recording.