Most smart doorbells are built around an account: you download an app, make an account, pay for cloud storage, and your camera footage takes a round trip to someone else’s server before you can see it on your phone. That’s a fine model if you trust it. I don’t, and I’d rather not.
The Reolink Video Doorbell turns out to be a legitimately good local-first doorbell for Home Assistant. It has native Home Assistant integration (no HACS required, no third-party integration), it exposes an RTSP stream for local video, and the doorbell press triggers reliably without a cloud dependency. There are some rough edges to set up, but once it’s running it’s one of the cleanest camera integrations I’ve used.
This is the guide I wish I’d had when I set mine up.
What You’ll Need
- A Reolink Video Doorbell — either WiFi or PoE
- An existing doorbell chime wired in your house (for the wired version) OR a standalone chime kit (Reolink sells one)
- Home Assistant running somewhere local — a Home Assistant Green is the easiest starting point
- The Reolink app, temporarily, for initial setup
WiFi vs PoE: The PoE model is more reliable. If you can run an ethernet cable to your doorbell location, do it. The WiFi version works fine but you’re depending on stable WiFi at your front door, which can vary. I run the PoE version and it’s been solid.
Step 1: Physical Installation
Standard doorbell wiring: your existing doorbell has two low-voltage wires (typically 16-24VAC from a transformer). The Reolink wired doorbell uses these for power. Disconnect the old doorbell, connect the two wires to the Reolink (polarity doesn’t matter), and mount it.
If you have a digital chime (the modern wireless kind), check compatibility. Reolink includes a chime bypass jumper that some digital chimes need. The installation guide covers this — read it before you touch any wires.
After mounting, your existing interior doorbell chime should still ring when someone presses the button. If it doesn’t, check the transformer voltage (needs to be 16V+) and the chime bypass setting.
Step 2: Initial Setup via Reolink App
This is the one time you’ll use the app. Download it, create a temporary Reolink account (you won’t need it after), and let the app find and configure the doorbell on your network.
During this process:
- Connect the doorbell to your WiFi (or let it get an IP via DHCP on PoE)
- Set a strong username and password — these are what Home Assistant will use, not your Reolink account credentials
- Note the IP address the doorbell gets. Assign it a static IP via your router’s DHCP reservation before you close the app. This is critical — if the IP changes later, your HA integration breaks.
After setup, you can log out of the Reolink account in the app and ignore it. Everything from here is local.
Step 3: Add the Reolink Integration in Home Assistant
In Home Assistant:
- Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration
- Search for Reolink
- Enter the doorbell’s IP address and the username/password you set in the app
- HA will discover the doorbell and create a device with all its entities
What you’ll get:
- Camera entities — main stream and sub stream (lower res, better for dashboards)
- Binary sensor: Doorbell — triggers when someone presses the button
- Binary sensor: Motion — triggers on detected motion
- Binary sensor: Person — if your doorbell has AI detection (most do)
- Select: Doorbell volume, ringtone — control the internal chime
- Switch: Spotlight, status LED — toggle the lights
The integration is native, maintained by the HA team, and generally just works. If you’re on a recent HA version (2024.1 or later), you’ll have the full feature set.
Step 4: The RTSP Stream
For low-latency local video (without going through the cloud), you want the RTSP stream. Reolink exposes it at:
rtsp://<username>:<password>@<ip>:554/h264Preview_01_mainFor the sub-stream (lower resolution, much less CPU-intensive for dashboards):
rtsp://<username>:<password>@<ip>:554/h264Preview_01_subAdd this to your HA dashboard with a Picture Glance or Picture Entity card pointing at the camera entity — the native integration handles the stream automatically, so you don’t have to paste the RTSP URL directly. But knowing the URL is useful if you want to pull the stream into something else (NVR software, a security display, Frigate).
Frigate note: If you run Frigate for local AI object detection, the Reolink doorbell pairs well with it. Point Frigate at the RTSP stream, let it do person/car detection locally, and feed the events back into Home Assistant. That’s a whole separate guide, but the pieces are there.
Step 5: The Doorbell Press Automation
This is what you actually want — someone presses the doorbell, Home Assistant does something useful.
In HA’s automation editor:
Trigger:
- Type: Device
- Device: [your Reolink doorbell]
- Trigger: Doorbell pressed (the binary sensor going
on)
Actions (examples):
- Send a notification with a camera snapshot to your phone
- Flash the living room lights
- Announce on a smart speaker: “Someone is at the door”
- Trigger a TTS announcement if you have speakers set up
For the snapshot notification, use the camera.snapshot action to grab a frame first, then notify.mobile_app_<your_phone> to send it:
action: camera.snapshot
target:
entity_id: camera.reolink_front_door
data:
filename: /config/www/doorbell_snapshot.jpgThen send the notification with the image URL pointing to /local/doorbell_snapshot.jpg.
A more complete approach: use a template notification that includes the snapshot URL inline, so your phone notification shows the camera still without you having to open the app.
Step 6: Motion Zones and Sensitivity
Back in the Reolink app (or the local web interface at http://<doorbell-ip>), you can configure motion detection zones and sensitivity. Set the zone to cover just your porch and front path — not the street, or you’ll get hundreds of false triggers from passing cars.
In Home Assistant, the motion binary sensor will reflect whatever sensitivity you’ve configured in the Reolink settings. I run mine at about 70% sensitivity, with a zone that covers the porch and the first 6 feet of the walkway.
Step 7: The Dashboard Card
For a useful doorbell card on your HA dashboard:
type: picture-glance
title: Front Door
entities:
- entity: binary_sensor.reolink_front_door_doorbell
icon: mdi:doorbell
- entity: binary_sensor.reolink_front_door_motion
icon: mdi:motion-sensor
- entity: binary_sensor.reolink_front_door_person
icon: mdi:account
camera_image: camera.reolink_front_door
camera_view: liveThis gives you a live camera tile with three status indicators — doorbell, motion, and person detection — and a tap to expand into the full stream.
Things That Don’t Work (Yet)
Honest caveats:
- Two-way audio in HA: You can hear audio from the camera stream, but initiating two-way talk through HA isn’t well-supported. You’ll still use the Reolink app for that. It’s a limitation of the integration, not the hardware.
- Package detection: The Reolink has package detection in the app, but that entity doesn’t surface in HA yet. Filed as a known gap upstream.
- Local playback of recordings: If you’re using Reolink’s onboard SD card for local recording, you can’t browse that footage through HA. Again, use the app or the web interface for playback. Frigate solves this if you want HA-native recording.
Is It Worth It?
The Reolink Video Doorbell runs around $60-80 depending on the version. For that, you get a 5MP camera, local video with no subscription, a clean Home Assistant integration, and a doorbell that still works normally as a doorbell for your visitors who don’t know or care about any of this.
The main competition at this price is Ring, which is cloud-only and getting more expensive with subscriptions. Eufy and Amcrest have similar local approaches, but the Reolink HA integration is better-maintained. For a Home Assistant household that wants doorbell video without cloud dependency, Reolink is the one I’d start with.
It’s not perfect — the two-way audio situation is annoying — but for what I actually use it for (seeing who’s at the door before I answer it, getting snapshots on my phone, and triggering automations), it works exactly as advertised.