I received a lot of feedback from my tweet about ditching a new Ring for Nest Hello.

Rather than tweetstorm it up, I’ll try and summarize it all here as to why I’m switching.

Most of it boils down to already owning a fair amount of devices in the Nest ecosystem (2nd-gen Thermostat, 3 Dropcams, 3 Protects) and wanting to stay in that. All my smart home gear is split between HomeKit and Nest. Since Ring doesn’t play in either of those ecosystems, it’s yet another platform to manage, and especially since Nest and HomeKit have zero integration without flaky hacks (Homebridge) adding a third platform that talks to neither, was already a step backwards.

I’ve toyed with the idea of replacing the Nest equipment, over time, but if I do it’ll have to be into HomeKit compatible devices. Ecobee has a great thermostat alternative, but as it is, Nest makes some of the best cameras, and there’s not an alternative to the Protect that I’m interested in right now. There is a First Alert competitor that looks interesting but I’ve had bad experiences with false alarms from standard First Alert detectors recently, so my trust in them is broken.

I was already planning to buy the Hello after we moved into our new house last month, but when Costco ran a promotion on the Ring 2 that included a year of monitoring and an extra Chime at a significant discount, I couldn’t resist trying it out.

The Ring is functionally fine. One of my biggest gripes however is the recording isn’t always on, and when it is triggered by an event it’s for a limited period of time. Most recently I noticed this when our new neighbors came to the door to introduce themselves. Being bad at remembering names, I went back to the video tape only to find it cut off after about 20 seconds. I still don’t know their names.

Since it’s not always on, and it’s in sunlight most late afternoons, after activating the first few seconds are over-exposed and worthless.

The benefits of Nest for me do come at a price. The cost of the Ring 2 package was about $50 less than the Hello, and the monitoring for Hello would run another $60 for the year.

One other consideration is that the Hello just looks nicer, in my opinion. The Ring isn’t ugly, it’s just kind of meh looking, to me. I admit to also having a sour impression to the quality of the hardware, having already swapped out faulty Ring for family members, as well as having some come DOA.