The recorder decides what your cameras can do. Choose it first.

XProtect is the video management system we deploy where the camera count runs into the hundreds and more than one site or department needs to share it. It records any ONVIF camera, scales from a single server to a federated multi-site estate with failover, has the deepest integration ecosystem in the industry, and is where our analytics push alarms and bookmarks. Licensing is perpetual per camera with an optional care plan; it needs a properly sized server and someone to administer it, which is usually us.

Nx does the same core job as Milestone, brand-independent recording over ONVIF and RTSP, in a lighter, faster-to-deploy package that a non-specialist can run day to day. Licences are perpetual per channel with no subscription, it runs on Windows, Linux or ARM, and its object search is a practical way to find an incident without scrubbing a timeline. It is our usual recommendation for a single building of twenty to fifty mixed cameras that nobody wants to replace.

Protect records to Ubiquiti's own consoles and NVRs and manages the cameras from the same dashboard as the network. There is no per-camera licence and no cloud subscription to keep recording, remote viewing works out of the box, and the interface is the cleanest of the four. The trade-off is the ecosystem: it records UniFi cameras only, so it suits a new fit-out or a site already on UniFi rather than a takeover of someone else's cameras.

A Hikvision NVR is a purpose-built recorder: plug in the cameras, set retention, done. Paired with Hikvision's own recent AI cameras it offers the most impressive incident search of the four, including plain-language queries on the newer models, and it needs no server or IT ownership. It gives its best only with Hikvision cameras, channel counts are fixed per box, and some government and critical-infrastructure procurement rules exclude the brand, so we check that before quoting.