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I bought the wrong doorbell, then bought the right one, and the wrong one turned out better
I replaced my front doorbell twice this year. The first replacement was an accident. The second was on purpose, cost $130 more, and after living with both I would tell most people to buy the accident.
Here is how that happened, and what I learned about the two devices along the way.
What I had before
A UniFi G4 Doorbell Pro, on Wi-Fi, for about a year. It was fine. The picture was 1080p and good enough to recognise somebody, the night view was reasonable for the resolution, and it talked to Home Assistant.
Two things wore me down. Being on Wi-Fi, the video quality dipped whenever the connection did. And it rang the bell at random, with nobody at the door. I never proved the cause, but my best guess is the transformer: the doorbell drew more power than the old chime wiring wanted to give, and the phantom presses were the result.
That is a specific kind of annoying. A doorbell that cries wolf trains you to ignore it.
The accident
Ubiquiti sells out. If you follow the brand at all you know that when something drops you buy it immediately or you wait months. Combine that with my own weakness for having the newest thing, and I bought a G6 Entry the day it appeared, believing it was the top model.
It was not. There is a Pro, and I did not read carefully enough to notice.
I only felt foolish for about a week, because the Entry was a substantial upgrade regardless. It was hardwired rather than Wi-Fi, and that alone fixed the picture quality problem, because the video no longer depended on a wireless link holding up. The phantom ringing stopped completely and has never come back.
Then I sold the old G4 on eBay. I had paid $189 for it. It sold for $550.
That is worth pausing on, because it changes the maths of buying Ubiquiti gear. Their equipment holds value absurdly well, and discontinued models often go up. I buy quickly and without much deliberation, but the risk is smaller than it sounds: if I dislike something, it goes back on eBay and I lose very little. Sometimes I make money.
Then I bought the Pro anyway
About a week after installing the Entry, I saw a Reddit thread discussing the Pro. My reaction was, roughly, oh no, there is a better one. I waited a few months for it to become available and bought it.
I planned to sell one of them. Instead I moved the Entry out to my side gate, where it replaced a UniFi G3 Reader Pro, and put the Pro on the front door. Nothing was wasted, and the G3 got sold too.
So the accident became my access reader, and the deliberate purchase became my doorbell.
The side gate, and the part that costs money
My side gate is next to the garage and leads to the back yard. I have wanted proper access control on it for years.
The G6 Entry line does doorbell duty and access control in one device, which is genuinely new. Previously I needed two: a doorbell that was only a doorbell, and a separate reader that only did access.
The gate now unlocks by face, by NFC card, or from the app. My gardener has a card and lets himself in, which is the single most useful thing any of this does.
But here is the part people miss. Access control still requires a UniFi Access hub. The doorbell does not drive the lock by itself. In my setup the hub is powered over Ethernet from an outdoor switch, the hub powers the doorbell, and the hub drives a fail-safe low-voltage lock on the gate. The reader and hub kit cost me around $550 before any of this.
So if you read “unlocks with your face” and picture a $249 purchase, add a hub and a lock to that. The UniFi Access software itself is free.
What the Pro actually buys you
This is where I have to be honest about a device I bought on impulse and still like.
| G6 Entry | G6 Pro Entry | |
|---|---|---|
| Main camera | 5MP at 30 FPS | 12MP at 20 FPS |
| Package camera | 8MP | 8MP |
| Face recognition | Yes | Yes |
| NFC card and fob | Yes | Yes |
| Touchscreen | No | 3-inch |
| Price | $249 | $379 |
Two exclusives, then: a sharper sensor and a screen.
The sensor is a real difference, and the front door footage is better than the gate footage. But notice the frame rate. The Pro shoots more detail at fewer frames per second. For a camera watching people walk toward a door, 20 frames against 30 is not nothing.
The screen I have never used. I have not changed the default image on it, and I have never set up the PIN entry for guests. It sits on my door doing nothing, and it is the main reason the Pro is noticeably bigger than the Entry.
The Pro also drops the fingerprint reader the G4 Doorbell Pro had. Ubiquiti shipped that sensor and then took a long time to actually enable it in firmware, and now the successor does not have one at all. I never used it either, so I cannot pretend to be wounded, but it is a feature that went backwards.
What both of them do well
Everything I actually value turned out to be common to both models.
The package camera. A second downward view of the doorstep, so a parcel on the mat is clearly in frame rather than cut off at the bottom.
Dynamic range. My porch is shaded with bright sun through an archway, which is the hardest lighting a doorbell faces. Both the shaded stonework and the neighbour’s house across the street stay legible in the same frame.
Night vision. Clean infrared that reaches past the porch to the street, without the blown-out white blob near the lens that cheap doorbells produce.
Reliability. Neither has ever dropped offline or needed a reboot. Because they are wired and Home Assistant runs locally, the automations keep working when the internet does not.
One honest visual criticism: the wide view comes with obvious barrel distortion. Straight walls bend at the edges of the frame. You get the whole doorstep, and you pay for it in curvature.
Home Assistant
Both appear through the UniFi Protect integration with everything you would want: the camera feed, the doorbell press, motion, and package detection as separate entities.
What I built on top is an automation I call Gatekeeper. When a person is detected, the doorbell’s own speaker immediately says “Person detected at the front entry,” which is deliberately boring and works as a mild deterrent. In parallel, a snapshot goes to a language model, which writes a short description of the visitor. That line is announced on four indoor speakers and pushed to our phones, along with a popup carrying the live feed and buttons to talk, open the gate, or close it.
The visitor hears the boring line. The house hears the useful one.
It is fast enough to be worth having, and the design has a rule I would recommend to anyone building something similar: every step that depends on the model has a path underneath it that does not. If the model is slow or down, you still get the notification, the snapshot, and the speaker. You lose the wit, not the alert.
I will write that automation up properly in its own article, including the mistake that silently broke a different one of mine for months.
Storage, since nobody mentions it
Higher resolution has to live somewhere. I record continuously at full resolution across 24 cameras onto a 24TB UNVR, and get about 15 days of history.
That is a useful benchmark if you are sizing a system. It also means the Pro’s extra resolution has a running cost, not just a purchase price.
No effect on my network, though my network is not typical: a Dream Machine Pro, an aggregation switch, and 10G links.
So which one should you buy?
Buy the G6 Entry.
For $130 less you get the same package camera, the same face recognition and NFC, the same reliability, the same Home Assistant integration, and more frames per second. You give up a sharper sensor and a touchscreen that I, an enthusiast who bought the expensive one deliberately, have never once used.
Buy the Pro if you specifically want the highest-resolution sensor on your door and you are content to trade frame rate for it. That is a real reason. It is just not most people’s reason.
I would buy it again, because I am the sort of person who buys the best available and worries about the justification afterwards. That is a personality trait, not a recommendation.
And if you buy either one, the thing that will actually improve your life is not the resolution. It is that it is hardwired, it does not ring by itself at two in the morning, and your gardener can let himself in.