Best Nanny Cams of 2025

Here are the home security cameras best suited for keeping an eye on kids and caregivers. As with all our rated products, from soundbars to Subarus, Consumer Reports bought these at regular retail outlets.

These features can make any security camera more effective. Some of them are particularly useful in a nanny cam.

• Person detection: A model with this feature can determine when a human is in its field of view and automatically record footage. Most cameras now have this feature and do a decent job with it.
• Crying and loud noise detection: If your camera has this feature, the microphone will start recording anytime there’s a loud noise and send you an alert. Some cameras let you choose what kinds of sounds will trigger a recording (e.g., a crying baby). Other cameras let you decide how loud the sound needs to be.
• Privacy mode or privacy shutter: The camera may have a setting (or physical shutter) that disables the camera. This is a great way to make your home feel more private when you’re there and don’t need to capture video.
• Two-way audio and audio recording: Most security cameras allow you to hear and speak with people in the camera’s field of view through a built-in speaker and microphone. These cameras will also record audio; nearly all cameras let you disable audio recording.
• App and voice control via digital assistants: The camera may work with third-party digital assistants and smart-home systems. That means you could ask an assistant to pull up the camera feed on a smart TV, say, to check on your sleeping child while you watch a movie, or view the camera feed from one app that consolidates several smart home devices. Popular platforms include Amazon Alexa, Apple Home and Siri, Google Home and Google Assistant, and Samsung SmartThings.
• Activity zones: Cameras with activity zones, sometimes called motion zones, let you highlight portions of the camera’s field of view to monitor. With an outside camera, you might choose to focus on your front steps to keep you from getting alerts every time a car drives by. Some cameras let you choose zones to ignore. With a nanny cam, that can keep you from getting an extraneous alert every time a ceiling fan is turned on or your pet turns around on a dog bed.

Nanny cams are relatively straightforward gadgets to set up and use, but doing so responsibly and within the bounds of the law can be trickier.

It’s legal to record video in all 50 states provided it’s not in a private space, even without permission from your caregiver. (The definition of a private space can be vague, ranging from a bathroom to an entire home.) The laws for audio recordings vary somewhat, as described below, with many states requiring you to get permission from anyone being recorded.

Regardless of the consent requirements in your state, the best approach is to be open and honest with your caregiver. My wife and I live in New Jersey, which allows people to record video and audio without getting permission, but that really didn’t affect our thinking. When we hired a caregiver for my first child, we told her that we had cameras in our home and would be using them while she worked. She didn’t express any qualms about it.

That’s not surprising, according to Cindy Lehnhoff, director of the National Child Care Association and a child care provider with over 40 years of experience. She says that many caregivers consider nanny cams a win-win technology. “Nanny cams can provide great peace of mind for parents to be sure that the needs of their child are being met,” she says. “On the side of the nanny, it can also be a protection against being maybe falsely accused of something, because that happens as well.”

To foster trust with your caregiver, some experts suggest giving them limited access to your nanny cam by creating a guest or secondary user account. This will help them know where the camera is located, and it could be a useful tool, for instance by helping them monitor an older child who’s playing in another room.

While we advise against it, if you want to record audio without your caregiver’s consent, you need to know whether you live in a one-party or two-party consent state.

Two-party consent states require that all participants in a conversation give permission before being recorded. There are just 13 of these: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

One-party consent states don’t have that requirement. But even if you live in a single-party consent state, you might not be allowed to record audio while you’re out of the house. In some of these states, the law requires you to be physically present during any recording.

All that said, keep in mind that if you choose not to be transparent with your caregiver, you could harm your working relationship and trust with them once they inevitably find the camera. In addition, nanny cams aren’t a foolproof way to keep your child safe, and if you don’t think your nanny is trustworthy, a hidden camera probably won’t be enough to fix that.

Finally, note that all these legal and ethical issues apply to other people who enter your home, such as other children and your friends and relatives.

To evaluate home security cameras, we focus our tests on how quickly a camera sends alerts to a smartphone when motion is detected, as well as its video quality, smart features, data privacy, and data security. Video quality is key for a home security camera, which is why we set up a room with multiple resolution charts, everyday objects, and mannequins as stand-ins for people, and evaluate how clear the video is from cameras in good light, low light, and zero light (to test night vision). 

We also test all these cameras for data privacy and security. We evaluate each company’s or service provider’s public documentation, such as privacy policies and terms of service, to see what claims the manufacturer makes about the way it handles your data. The tests include an inspection of the user interface and network traffic from each camera and its companion smartphone app to make sure it’s using encryption, following security best practices, such as encouraging complex passwords and multifactor authentication, and not sharing your data with irrelevant third parties.

For more information on our in-depth testing methodology, see our home security camera buying guide.