The Best Camera for Pet Monitoring

Garrett Bogar
2026-04-03T13:45:29-07:00

Explore the evolution of pet monitoring and compare the latest pan-tilt cameras to find the best balance of AI tracking, storage, and features for your home.

More

Folks, for thousands of years, humans left their pets at home and went about their day. No cameras. No notifications. No live feeds. No way to confirm (again), from a Walgreens parking lot at 2pm on a Tuesday, that the cat had (still) not knocked the lamp off the shelf.

And yet, people lived. Pets lived. Civilization persisted.

Then came, first, the smartphone, and second, the affordable home security camera. And through this marriage pet owners everywhere made two realizations:

1. they could now know exactly what their pet was doing at any given moment;

2. and actually, come to think of it, they couldn’t not know what their pet was doing at any given moment

Hey, we get it. We're not here to judge. We're here to help you pick a camera.

The short version? Buy a Wyze Cam Pan v3. It’s cheap, it tracks motion automatically, and it won't gatekeep your own footage behind a massive subscription.

The Answer and then the Real Answer

Before we get into the hardware, let’s be straight. Any basic, fixed home security camera will do an adequate job here, especially if your dog sleeps on the couch. (And let’s be honest, if he’s not supposed to sleep on the couch, your dog definitely sleeps on the couch.) So one way to approach this article might be to ignore the “pet” angle altogether, and just pit the various companies’ cameras head-to-head, like we did in our “Best affordable home security camera” post.

But let's be honest about what we're actually solving for. Pet monitoring is different from basic home security.

When you're shopping for a security camera, the need is straightforward: you want to know if someone is in your house who shouldn't be. The camera watches a door, a driveway, the back patio. It just needs to sit and wait.

Pet monitoring is different. From the adorable, to the mischievous, to the scatological, pet monitoring is about antics. It’s about chaos. It’s about your dog’s complicated relationship with the trash, your cat’s complicated relationship with the plants, and their mutually complicated relationship with the rug.

The point is, what you're trying to capture is mobile and unpredictable, and a camera that watches one static corner of your living room is going to miss a lot of the story.

So if your dog mostly sleeps and you just want to confirm he's still breathing, just pick your favorite standard cam and point it at the couch. It’ll work great. (You can pick up a nice one from Wyze for thirty bucks.)

But if we’re gonna get serious about the question, “What is the best camera for pet monitoring?” there is a single, clear winner, beloved by pet owners everywhere. A camera designed to embrace the chaos:

The pan cam.

Meet the Wonderful Pan Cam

A pan cam solves the problem of your pets’ movement and unpredictability in the most direct way possible: it follows them.

Any pan cam rotates somewhere in the neighborhood of 360° horizontally and 180° vertically, and some even provide AI motion tracking that will follow your pet across the room in real time. Add to that the usual two-way audio, which allows you to speak to your pet through the camera from anywhere, and you’ve got a camera that can not only follow the chaos, but interact with it.

(Brief aside: It should be said that, in our experience, dogs respond to this with moderate confusion and then go back to whatever they were doing. Cats respond by gazing briefly at the camera, then ignoring it with intention. Either way, it's considered by many to be deeply satisfying.)

Add in color night vision and you’re now fully covered, even after dark, which matters more depending on your four-legged friend of choice. We’re looking at you, cats!

So the real question in “What’s the best pet camera?” is, “What’s the best pan camera?”

Let’s answer it.

What’s the Best Pan Cam?

Here are the numbers. We’ll put the major pan cams side-by-side and see how things shake out.

Feature | Wyze Cam Pan v3 | Wyze Cam Pan v4 | Blink Mini Pan-Tilt | Ring P&T Indoor Cam | Arlo Essential Pan/Tilt | Furbo 360° Dog Camera | Nest
Price | $39.98 | $59.98 | $39.99 | $59.99 | $59.99 | $184 | -
Resolution | HD | 4K | HD | HD | 2K | HD | 2K
Pan/Tilt Range | 360° pan/ 180° tilt | 360° pan/ 180° tilt | 350° pan/ 135° tilt | 360° pan/ 169° tilt | 360° pan/ 180° tilt | 270° pan (360° view) / no tilt (fixed view) | -
AI Motion Tracking | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes
Night Vision | Color Night Vision (Starlight Sensor) | Color Night Vision (Starlight Sensor) | B&W (Infrared) | Color Night Vision | Color Night Vision | Color Night Vision | B&W (Infrared)
Local Storage | MicroSD (256GB max) | MicroSD (512GB max) | Via Sync Module ($49.99) + USB Flash Drive | Requires Ring Alarm Pro Base Station ($249.99) + Ring AI Pro Plan ($19.99/mo) + MicroSD card (64GB max) | Requires Hub ($99.99) | None | 3 hours on device. No Additional

Cloud Recording Plans

$2.99/mo Cam Plus Plan

$2.99/mo Cam Plus Plan

$3.00/mo Blink Basic Plan

$4.99/mo Ring Solo Plan

$7.99/mo
Arlo Plus Plan

$9.99/mo Nanny Plan

$10/mo
Standard Plan

History | 14 Days | 14 Days | 60 Days | 180 Days | 60 Days | 3 Days | 30 Days

A few takeaways. Nest doesn't make a pan cam, which probably means they hate pets. Do with that what you will. The remaining field breaks into three price tiers: most expensive is Furbo at $184, in the middle are Arlo, Ring, and Wyze v4 at about $60, while most affordable are Wyze at $39.98 and Blink, who callously charge a whole one cent more at $39.99. The sheer inhumanity! It’s like they don’t even think their customers are people.

On paper, the cameras look largely comparable. Arlo upgraded from 1080p to 2K resolution. Everyone has two-way audio. Everyone covers 360° pan. But here's where it gets interesting for pet owners specifically: not all of these cameras will actually follow your pet.

Wyze, Arlo, and Furbo all offer automatic AI motion tracking—the camera detects movement and rotates to keep your pet in frame on its own. Ring and Blink, on the other hand, are manual. They'll send you a notification when they detect motion. Then you have to open the app and steer the camera yourself. Yourself! In the year 2026! Hey Ring and Blink, if we wanted to spend the afternoon manually searching for our pets, we’d have all bought ferrets.

Add to that the fact that Ring’s camera is borderline useless without a subscription and an AI Pro Plan, and Blink’s also requires you to buy extra hardware before you can store video, and the real competition is between Furbo, Wyze, and Arlo. All three auto-track, all are solid cameras. The difference comes down to price.

Furbo is obviously in its own special, zillion-dollar category there (Okay, fine, only $184), so let’s first just talk about Wyze versus Arlo. Wyze gives you free local storage with a simple SD card, plus significantly lower up front and subscription costs. Arlo wants an extra twenty bucks up front and an extra $8 a month on the subscription. They’ll let you store video locally, but only if you buy their $100 smart hub. What are you getting for all those extra dollars?

Answer: an extra 45 days of free cloud storage. That’s it.

Wyze will store your videos for 14 days. Arlo and Blink will store them for free for 60. The extra twenty dollars buys you a longer memory for footage you're definitely not reviewing anyway. You ever think “Hey, I wonder what my dog was doing 40 days ago?” Of course not. And if you do want local storage, Wyze handles that with a $10 SD card. Arlo handles it with a $100 hub.

We'd be remiss not to mention the elephant way out at the far right end of that chart, which is that Wyze also offers a true premium option in the Pan Cam v4. At $60 (just twenty dollars more than the v3) Wyze offers full 4K Ultra HD resolution, a level of detail that makes faces, license plates, and yes, whatever your dog is doing to the couch unmistakably clear. Nobody else is offering 4K in a pan cam. Period. Pan Cam v4 also has superior AI that can follow instructions. Tell it to prioritize following the person over the dog, or the dog over the cat. The camera tracks the action you tell it to track.

Those are genuine premium features at a price still twenty dollars less than what Ring wants for a 2K pan cam with no local storage (unless you spend $249.99 upfront + $19.99/mo) and no auto-tracking, and $120 less than what Furbo wants for 1080p and no tilt!

Wyze wins. Wyze wins two different ways. Wyze wins no matter how you slice it.

Now let’s talk more about Furbo.

Furbo: a Brief Meditation on the Treat Cannon

So what’s the deal with Furbo, “the world’s smartest pet camera”? The camera that isn’t content just to work great as a pet camera, but actually brands itself as being literally dedicated to pets. It’s $184, or $54 if you commit up front to a ten-dollar-a-month subscription. What’s its deal?

Here's what the Furbo is:

a 1080p pan cam (sound familiar),

with a 360° rotating view (sound familiar),

two-way audio (sound familiar),

color night vision (sound familiar),

and AI motion tracking (slightly less common, as we’ve learned, but again, not exactly the road less traveled, folks).

It also has a natural bamboo cover, which is lovely.

And finally, and this is legit badass, a built-in launcher that holds up to 100 treats and fires them at your dog on command from your phone.

Credit where credit is due. Anything with a cannon is rad. That’s science. If you tell us we can put jelly beans in this thing and launch them at our kids, frankly that’s just good parenting. At a minimum, they’ve discovered a new way to dispense nyquil tablets the next time your husband has a man cold.

This is a cool, if somewhat niche feature. If your dog has separation anxiety and you want to toss him a biscuit from the school pickup line, only the Furbo does it. But let’s be honest, are you still going to be using that feature after the first month, or are you eventually just going to have 100 old dog treats getting stale in your treat cannon?

And here's the math. Even with the lower subscription price Furbo, in its first year, is going to run you between $137 and $174. After two years it will be pushing $300. Wyze Pan Cam can do the same job, minus the treat launcher and fancy hat, for $40. $300 versus $40. Even with a subscription, Wyze will only have reached $76 after a year and $112 after two.

Plus, with Furbo, when AI takes over the world you’ll have an armed device sitting right in your home. After the singularity, that thing’s gonna be launching dog treats at your loved ones.

And Finally… AI

We've spent most of this article talking about hardware, but a lot has changed in home security cameras over the years. Most recently: they got brains. What are the current intelligence standings between you, your camera, and your dog? We’re not here to rank. The camera may now be closer than you’d like to admit. Also the dog.

The point is, cameras now have the ability to provide both pet detection and descriptive alerts. In less than ten years, we’ve moved from “Movement detected” to “Pet detected” to “Little white dog humping couch.” That’s real progress!

Wyze led the industry on several of these features, and the competition has been playing catch-up ever since. Nowadays, pet detection and descriptive alerts are becoming standard across the industry. The question is what it’s going to cost you to get them. Let’s do one last comparison to find out.

Company | Plan & Price | AI Pet Detection | AI Descriptive Alerts | AI Video Search

Wyze

Cam Plus
$2.99/mo

Included

-

-

Wyze

Cam Unlimited
$9.99

Included

-

-

Wyze

Cam Unlimited Pro
$19.99/mo

Included

Included

Included

Blink

Basic AI
$6.99/mo

-

Included

-

Blink

Plus AI
$19.99/mo

-

Included

-

Ring

Solo
$4.99/mo

-

-

-

Ring

Multi
$9.99/mo

-

-

-

Ring

AI Pro
$19.99/mo

Included

Included

Included

Arlo

Plus
(Single Camera)
$7.99/mo

Included

-

-

Arlo

Plus
(Unlimited Cameras)
$17.99/mo

Included

-

-

Arlo

Premium
$24.99/mo

Included

Included

Included

All four camera brands in this comparison will send you a notification when your pet moves. Only Wyze, Arlo, and Ring can tell you it was your pet. Blink offers none of this, at any subscription tier, which is one more way Blink's low sticker price tends to dissolve on contact with reality.

The other three also offer AI-driven descriptive alerts that go further, generating plain-English summaries of what the camera actually saw. The difference is what you're going to pay. Arlo's subscriptions run $7.99 to $24.99 a month depending on how many cameras you have and what AI features you want (similar to Wyze). Ring's pet detection starts at $19.99 a month through their AI video descriptions. Wyze's pet detection starts at $2.99 a month per camera, or $9.99 flat for as many cameras as you want. Same intelligence, fraction of the subscription bill, and all (unlike Ring) with footage that's actually yours.

The Bottom Line

Your pet is, in all likelihood, fine.

But with Wyze you can confirm that in real time, in full color, at night, from anywhere, without a subscription, and without a treat cannon, for a much lower price.

If you want a treat cannon, buy a treat cannon. Who wouldn’t want a treat cannon? We’re not gonna take that away from you.

But the Wyze Cam Pan v3 is the clear best option. Forty dollars. It follows your pets. It stores the evidence. It does not launch snacks. That last one is on you.

Frequently Asked

Q: Are these cameras "chew-proof" or safe to place within reach of a large dog?
A: None of the cameras listed—including the Furbo—are armored or "chew-proof." They are made of standard consumer plastics. If you have a "super-chewer" or a curious large breed, we recommend mounting the camera at least five feet high.

Q: Will the noise of the camera motor scare my pet or wake them up?
A: Most modern pan cams use brushless motors that are nearly silent to human ears, but pets have much more sensitive hearing. In a dead-quiet room, your pet will likely hear the faint "whir" of the gears as the camera rotates to track them. In our experience, pets usually react to the noise for the first 48 hours—often looking directly at the lens—before eventually habituating to it and ignoring the camera entirely.

Q:What is the best "tactical" placement for a pan cam?
A: Since these cameras have 360° views, placing them in a corner actually wastes half of their field of view. For the best results, place the camera on a central "island" or a side wall halfway down the room. Also, consider the height: for cats, higher is better so you can see them on bookshelves; for dogs, counter-height is ideal so you aren't just looking at the top of their heads all day.

Q: Can I mount these cameras upside down on the ceiling?
A: Most pan cams (especially the Wyze Pan v3 and the Wyze Cam v4) are designed to be mounted upside down. This is actually a great way to keep them out of reach of "chewers." Most camera apps have a "Rotate Image 180°" setting that will flip the video feed so it looks normal on your phone. Just be aware that if the camera has a "Treat Cannon" like the Furbo, mounting it upside down will—for obvious, gravity-related reasons—not work.