Best home alarm system with door sensors?

I went with SimpliSafe. Google told me they were the highest rated home system and the components offered gave me a lot of flexibility. I hunted around and waited until a package that had all or most of what I needed came on sale and added to this over time. My house is really long and there are several entrance doors around the house so I eventually want cameras watching every exterior door/window. Buying it as a sale bundle saved me a great deal of money. Costco had great prices and they also carry a window/door alarm package that I bought because there are a lot of windows in this house. Pretty much everything thatI wanted came in one of the bundles and I just needed to add a water sensor for my laundry room. I think I have a pretty comprehensive setup. They also have smoke detectors but I had already installed new ones. If I hadn’t, I would have gotten them to go with my setup.

I have both indoor and outdoor cameras set up. I didn’t really need the indoor cameras but they came in the sale bundles. I ended up just placing one of them to monitor the cats in the laundry room at night. If I don’t put them in there, I don’t get more than a few minutes sleep. I also put one on the window ledge so that it monitors out of that window. I actually prefer that one because it is plugged in whereas the outdoor cameras need a battery. Well, you can buy the kit to run to electricity or a kit for solar charging, but I haven’t done that yet and might not need to. Battery usage for outdoor cameras depends on how many things the camera needs to record. My front yard cameras pick up much more movement from cars driving by or mail and package deliveries.

With SimpliSafe, you can choose whether or not to have the company monitor your alarms for you. It is about $30 a month, if I am remembering correctly. Well worth it for me since I live alone. If you decide not to pay for their monitoring, the alarms will still go off and alert you, they just don’t go to the monitoring company to call the police for you. And let me tell you, they are really fast at sending help! I accidentally forgot about the system when I first had it and went into the garage from the house. I was out there about five minutes and with my diminished hearing, I didn’t know the alarm had been triggered. I walked back into the house to see the police at my front door! I was so embarrassed, but they were really nice about it. I immediately purchased one of their auxiliary alarms that has a louder than the regular base alarm. I don’t want to make that mistake again. Oh, and when the alarm is tripped, they call you to check on you first. If you don’t pick up, they send the police. With the monitoring service, any video recorded is available fir 30 days.

The system has a home and away alarm setup so that the company knows when you are not in the house when an alarm is triggered. They can view your cameras to see if someone has broken in. You always receive notification on your phone for camera activation, window/door alarms, and when the doorbell is rung and you can respond to the door speakers from your phone. I like that I can check the whole exterior of my house from both my phone when I am not home and from my iPad when I am home. It came in handy when a neighbor came to the door and I was in the shower. I was able to talk to him from the phone to let him know to come back later. I have one of the cameras set up to where I can see my front porch to see if a package has been delivered which has been really handy too.

I think that is about it. Let me know if you have any questions.

The main unit has a battery so that if your power is shut off for any reason, the system continues working for 24 hours or when the power comes back on.

Check with your insurance company. You might get a reduction on home insurance if you have an alarm system

Another vote for Simplisafe. We’ve had ours for years. Easy to set up. No drilling into yours walls, etc. You can also start with the basic system and add more cameras, motion detectors, etc. as they go on sale. There’s always a great sale on Black Friday every year.

We have the Ring system. Basically the same as the pp said about Simplisafe. There are 3 modes (disarmed, home and away). When it is home and armed we can move around inside the house freely but the alarm goes off if a window or exterior door is open. This is what my kids use when they are home alone. The away and armed is the same except the motion sensors within the house are activated.

You can choose to pay extra for their monitoring.

I like it because I can have everything in this app like the smoke and CO2 alerts, ability to open and close garage door. We have the same setup for our college aged daughter at the place she lives at during the school year. For hers though we also have indoor lights within it so when she is coming home at night she can turn the lights on before she gets there so no one can see that she is going in to an empty house.

We also like that we can connect an Echo show to the outside cameras so our 11 yo dd can go to that and say Alexa show me driveway camera, side camera, etc and then see it on the screen.