Frigate
An open source NVR with built in AI object detection, designed to run locally on your own hardware with no cloud account required.
Frigate is an open source network video recorder with AI object detection built in. It pulls in RTSP video streams from cameras, processes them in real time, and stores footage on your own hardware. It can detect people, vehicles, animals, packages, faces, and licence plates. No cloud account, no subscription.
What it detects out of the box
Frigate ships with models capable of identifying people, vehicles, animals, and packages. It also supports face recognition and licence plate recognition, which opens a different class of automation. A recognised face can turn on exterior lights. A known plate on the drive can trigger the heating before you reach the door.
How it connects to Home Assistant
What sets Frigate apart is how tightly it integrates with home automation. It publishes every detection event to an MQTT message broker. Home Assistant subscribes and acts immediately. Frigate handles the vision. Home Assistant handles what happens next.
Running the AI locally
AI inference runs on your own hardware. On a Raspberry Pi 5, the CPU can handle it but the load is noticeable across everything else running on the machine. Adding a Google Coral USB Accelerator offloads inference to a dedicated chip, dropping detection time to around 10 milliseconds per frame and freeing the Pi entirely.
Configuration
Frigate deploys as a Docker container and is configured through a YAML file. The documentation is thorough but the configuration has a meaningful learning curve, particularly around detection zones and filters. Keeping a backup copy of your config alongside the main file is good practice.
Frigate Plus
Frigate Plus is an optional paid tier that trains a custom model on your specific camera data. You log misidentified snapshots, label them correctly, and receive a rebuilt model trained on your own footage. You pay once and download the result. The base model also improves over time as other users contribute labelled corrections.
Frigate is the standard choice in the self hosted home automation space for good reason. It is well maintained and has a large and active community.