This is absolutely true. To be honest, I used to have a lot of connection problems and needing to restart my cameras, etc, and I thought Wyze was the problem. Then some of my friends told me they had a nearly flawless experience. We were both using the exact same company and devices, but our experience was totally opposite, so I had to ask myself, if the company and devices aren’t the difference here, what is? And I dove down a huge rabbit hole to figure out why their experience was perfect and mine was not. I made a list of everything I found that contributed to connection differences here:
The end result was that I turned from being someone with a bad experience with bad Wyze connection issues to becoming one of the people who suddenly had a nearly flawless experience despite now having over 40 cameras and over 300 total Wyze devices. All of them work great. So I am fairly convinced the company usually isn’t really the main problem. I encourage other people with connection issues to start asking themselves similar questions. If some people are able to have a near flawless experience with excellent connectivity, and the difference is not the company and not the device, what else could the difference be, and then explore some of those things if you want an improved experience. There is no camera company out there that has all their users with perfect connectivity, and this is the biggest reason why. Lots of it is environmental and router protocol differences, among dozens of other variables.
Still, for those interested in this question:
I can’t speak on “dependable” because that will depend on a lot of things in your particular situation of which nobody can have any knowledge. If someone asked me what was dependable for me, I would say Wyze is extremely dependable for me for the last several years since I fixed the issues that were causing it not to be. But I can speak on what many other people feel are strong competitors to Wyze:
- Reolink
- TP Link Tapo
- Eufy
- Yi
- Blink
- Roku (uses Wyze though, so if you are having problems with Wyze, then you probably will with Roku too)
There are lots of more expensive ones too, but those are most of the Wyze-pricing/feature-level competitors. I believe all of them are Chinese-owned companies except for Blink (and Roku)…which means they are all subject to the Chinese Government requiring they turn over all their user data and give them access to everything without you ever knowing it. But I don’t think there are a lot of affordable US-based companies competing on Wyze’s level. Most of the other US-based ones are a little more expensive:
- Ring
- Arlo
- Nest
But those are all of the most common ones people talk about. There are several more obscure options too. None of them are perfect, but some of them will work better for some people than others (such as work with a person’s particular router protocols better or something) and some of them suit people’s particular preferences better over all. Certainly each company is better for different people in different ways. I hope everyone finds whatever works best for them. 