14 Open Source Free NVR Solutions For Home and Business Security

What is an NVR program?

An NVR or Network Video Recorder program is a part of a digital video surveillance system that allows recording CCTV through the network into a digital recorder.

As the market has many commercial and enterprise software, which are sometimes overpriced, here we offer you a list of open-source free NVR alternative solutions.

We published an article about open source CCTV systems which contains some complete NVR/ DVR systems, however, since many search for NVR systems, we compiled this list for you.

Yet, we have to note that some open source solutions are community based, and they offer community-based support, yet they also offer a pro and enterprise editions for businesses.

Open source solutions will help you maintain your control over your data, setup, configuration, without the need to register or subscribe to any third-party service.

However, you also can build your own CCTV/ NVR system using single board computers like Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, and others.

In this article, we offer you a collection of various open source free NVR solutions with different features. We highly recommend going through their features and documentation to pick up the right one that fits your requirement.

1- Camera UI

Camera UI is a free open-source NVR system that works as a self-hosted web-based system. It is easy to setup, configure and use, as it also comes with a dozen of useful features and multilingual support.

Camera UI Highlights

Live Streams on Web
Camview: A resizable, drag & drop camera overview
Web Application with almost full PWA support like push notification and more
Multi-language: Easily expandable multi-language support
Motion Detection via video analysis, MQTT, FTP, SMT or HTTP.
Image Rekognition via AWS Rekognition
Notifications via Alexa, Telegram, Webhook and WebPush
Snapshot/Video: Save recording of snapshots/videos locally when motion is detected
Prebuffering: See the seconds before the movement event
User Interface: Beautiful and with love designed interface with 8 different color themes, dark mode and more
HomeKit: Easily expose the cameras to Apple Home with HSV support

2- OS-NVR

OS-NVR is a free open-source CCTV NVR system with a light speed performance. It is written in the Go programming language and comes with a mobile-friendly user interface.

The project has been rewritten in Rust and renamed to SentryShot.

3- Viseron

Viseron is a web-based self-hosted NVR system with an artificial intelligence computer vision support. It is written primary in Python and comes with many useful features as motion detection, object detection, face recognition, and many more.

Viseron can also be installed on Raspberry Pi 3b+ and 4, also it supports Intel NUC and Linux machines with NVIDIA GPU.

4- Surveillance Center

Surveillance Center is a cross-platform open-source free web-based video surveillance system.

It accepts images using the built-in FTP server or via an external MQTT broker and has a web-based, mobile optimized interface to browse and manage surveillance snapshots.

While it offers a great mobile-friendly interface, and a set of a great features, it does not come with a built-in motion detection. However, you can use the built-in motion detection from your IP camera.

5- Moonfire NVR

Moonfire NVR is an open-source security camera network video recorder, It saves H.264-over-RTSP streams from IP cameras to disk into a hybrid format. It requires little CPU and can also run on a Raspberry Pi 2 with 1080p/30fps streams.

6- Simple NVR

This is a simple Network Video Recorder (NVR) that is designed to run on low-resource cheap hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi with a hard drive. 24/7 video streams from network cameras are saved, and the recorded files are browsable from a basic web interface.

Simple NVR requires FFmpeg installation, and minimal configuration.

7- Frigate

Frigate is a full CCTV NVR security system that uses real-time object detection. It can be used to decrease false positive alarms with local object detection. It also supports multiple cameras, zone detection, and many other features.

Frigate can integrate easily with your home automation system such as Home Assistant; the open-source home automation solution.

8- Feniks

Feniks is a free open-source NVR with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. It records your camera streams 24/7, supports 80 object detection including human body, and face, and allows developer to custom their own AI-based object and motion detection options.

Feniks can be installed natively on Linux systems, but it also can be installed on macOS and Windows with Docker/ Docker Compose.

9- NVRJS

NVR JS is a simple, very lightweight and efficient CCTV NVR based on Node.js.
it's primarily aimed for 24/7 recording and live viewing.

Under the hood it uses the FFmpeg library, Node.js, Web Sockets and SQLite, all wrapped in a web based user interface. The NVR has an API that allows to create events and timestamp them on the 24/7 recordings.

The 24/7 recordings can be reviewed using a timeline UI where the events are also time aligned on that same timeline.

10- VigilantPI

Vigilant is an NVR system for IP cameras, having mainly Raspberry Pi as target.

It can record any URL supported by FFmpeg. It provides some HTTP hooks that can be used to deal with IP camera's instabilities.

If you want to use Raspberry Pi as a surveillance system, we got you covered in this article that contain a collection of projects, documentation, scripts to help you build your Raspberry Pi CCTV/ NVR system.

11- Bluecherry

Bluecherry is a free open-source complete surveillance solution for Linux systems. It supports ONVIF, GPU motion detection, and IP cameras.

Bluecherry supports multiple users and comes with an easy installation script, and cross-platform clients.

The community edition is free and open source, but it supports only 4 cameras.

It works seamlessly on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Manjaro.

12- iSpy

iSpy is a complete DVR and NVR surveillance solution that supports wide range of cameras, multiple recording formats, large number of sensors for motion detections and more.

iSpy is a free system that offers agents for desktop, mobile, and the web. It is also ready to integrate with Amazon Alexa, Home Assistant, IFTTT, DeepStack AI, and many platforms.

From the download page, you can choose your favorite package for your platform of course: Linux, Docker, or Windows.

13- Shinobi

Shinobi a complete straightforward lightweight web-based CCTV/ NVR solution that supports recording in MP4 and WebM formats, real-time streaming monitoring, and mobile recording.

It supports local USB cameras and IP cameras as well without the need for a complex configuration.

Shinobi offers two editions a community edition with is free and open source, and an enterprise Pro edition for businesses.

Shinobi

14- ZoneMinder

ZoneMinder is an industrial grade open source full surveillance system for home, office, companies, factories, and farms. It comes with a scalable NVR/ DVR, developer-friendly API, and a great mobile/ desktop app that put the whole system under your control.

Wrap-up

Open source NVR solutions is an ideal for home, business and industrial security.They are cost-effective, scalable, feature-rich, and community-supported.

Yet, they may require a certain technical skill level for the setup and installation process.

If you know of any other open source free NVR software that we did not list here, let us know, and we will gladly add it to our list.