These 3 subscription-free video doorbells will let you watch for trick-or-treaters

Halloween is nearly here, which means lots of spooky little visitors arriving at your door. It’s a lot of fun, but if you want to see who’s waiting before opening the door with a bowl full of candy, you need a video doorbell.

Video doorbells are great for boosting your home security and watching out for deliveries all year round, but sometimes there’s a catch. Although the doorbell itself might be cheap, many manufacturers lock the most advanced features (such as package detection) behind a subscription paywall. Want to save your videos and check them later? You might have to pay for that as well.

You’ll notice that there are no Ring devices here. That’s because, although you can answer a Ring doorbell and see a live video feed without a subscription, your recordings won’t be stored anywhere, so if you miss a visitor, you can’t check who it was later. Features like package-detection are behind a paywall, too, as is the ability to go back and check old alerts. Take a look at our full guide to Ring subscriptions for more details.

Best all-round

4K doorbells are now widely available, but usually burdened by subscription fees), and during our tests, we were thoroughly impressed by its motion-sensing capabilities. In terms of responsiveness, it was up there with the best home security cameras. Night vision is crisp as well (the doorbell is equipped with infrared sensors).

We found installation refreshingly straightforward, with a choice of mounting plates so you can choose one to suit your home, and it can be used with existing doorbell wiring or wireless from a rechargeable battery.

The 7000 Series isn’t the cheapest video doorbell around, but its price is competitive considering how much you’re getting. It’s around the same as the Ring Video Doorbell 2, which requires a membership to save and review video footage.

The only other drawback for us was a slight lag we noticed during two-way talk with visitors. Otherwise, the 7000 Series is hard to beat.

Read our full Philips 7000 Series Video Doorbell review

Best budget

The Philips 7000 Series isn’t available in the UK, but the EP3x Pro is, and it’s the cheapest video doorbell in this guide with a list price of just $149.99 / £129.99 (about AU$220). You don’t get as much local storage for your videos, but 32GB with no subscription fee is nothing to sniff at.

Video doorbells are usually pretty straightforward to install, but we found the EZVIZ app particularly intuitive, and had the EP3x Pro up and running in just a couple of minutes. It makes checking your video clips especially easy as well, showing you a handy list of callers who have visited over the last 30 days, so you can easily see if you missed a delivery and when.

Again, there are two cameras (one for faces and one for packages), and footage is recorded at 2K. Rather than an infrared camera, the EP3x Pro uses bright LEDs to help record visitors after dark. It’s not discreet, but it means you get full color recording at night, which makes identifying callers easier.

One of this doorbell’s standout features is its ability to run from a solar charger, which drastically increases its battery life compared with conventional wireless doorbells. You can basically set it and forget it, which we love, and if anyone tries to pry it off the wall, they’ll trigger the anti-tamper alarm.

We sometimes experienced a short delay between a visitor pressing the button and us receiving a notification on our phone, but that was the only setback. Once we were connected, two-way talk worked flawlessly without lag.

Again, you can get extra cloud storage if you really want it (EZVIZ offers a service called CloudPlay), but frankly, there’s plenty of space on the doorbell, and no other features are behind a paywall, so there’s no need.