Vivint Home Security Review

Vivint has top-notch smart home equipment and a no-contract option. It also has top-tier prices and a sometimes questionable customer service reputation. But overall, if you’re looking for the smartest system possible, we think it’s worth it to say yes to Vivint.

To get the most accurate review possible, we tested a Vivint system that includes all cameras, a Smart Drive, a flood sensor, a lamp module, and Car Guard.

Vivint offers three monitoring plans that meet different levels of security and smart home customization.

Go big or go home!

If you’re going to shell out for Vivint equipment at Vivint prices, we think you might as well go whole hog. Get the Smart Home Video plan so that you can take full advantage of Vivint smart home and video features.

But if the Smart Home Video plan is too pricey for your pocketbook, our next suggestion is the Smart Home plan. We don’t really recommend the Smart Security plan—Vivint’s strength is in its smart home connectivity, not its basic security devices.

Vivint costs add up quickly.

Vivint home security monitoring service starts at about $30 a month. If you want smart home integration (which we recommend), you’ll pay $40. And if you want video, you’ll pay a starting price of $45 a month. Oh, and for every camera you add to your system after the first one, it’s an extra $5 every month.

If you reach the six-camera maximum, that pushes you up to almost $70, which is more than ADT’s most expensive plan. And ADT’s no slouch when it comes to prices.

That’s not even counting the equipment costs, which typically start at around $599. We’ll dive more into the equipment a little later.

Happily, Vivint is one of the only professionally installed systems that doesn’t require a contract.

To our understanding, when you go the non-contract route with Vivint, you can cancel at any time, with no fees or penalties. The cancellation requires 30 days to take effect, so you’ll likely have one final bill to pay after you’ve formally canceled. But altogether, it seems like a relatively painless process.

However! You can only get the non-contract option if you pay for all of your equipment at the start. That means you’re looking at shelling out $600+ right off the bat.

If you can’t afford that, you must take a loan through Vivint and repay it over a five-year contract (in addition to the cost of your monthly monitoring fees). And yes, that’s two years longer than the average industry contract, which is a pain.

Five years is a long time, and you might need to cancel your contract. Last we heard, Vivint takes 100% of your remaining equipment and monitoring costs as a cancellation fee, unless you have extenuating circumstances.

If you have plans to move in the future, keep in mind that you will have to pay a $129 fee to get your system reinstalled. 

Read How Much Does Vivint Cost? to get a fuller financial picture.

Vivint has a lot of unique smart home equipment.

Most home security companies focus on, well, home security. In contrast, Vivint excels at smart home products.

That doesn’t mean that its security system is bad. We’ve used it for about six weeks, and we think it’s a perfectly good system. But to get the best use of Vivint, you need to go for a full-on smart home setup. So if smart home functionality doesn’t matter to you, a Vivint alarm isn’t your best fit.

Vivint also stands out because it makes the majority of its own equipment. Systems like ADT and local providers buy devices from third-party manufacturers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you’re paying sky-high prices for security, it’s nice to get something special.

Let’s take a look at Vivint’s equipment roster.

Vivint equipment:

Vivint tends to offer customized packages, but their basic offering typically includes the control panel, two door sensors, a flood sensor, and a smart detector.

Vivint’s best security features come through its Car Guard and cameras (both of which we’ll discuss in a minute).

The Car Guard tracks your car’s location so you’ll know if it’s stolen or disturbed.

The outdoor and doorbell cameras use features called Smart Deter and Smart Sentry to identify and scare off lurkers and intruders. Essentially, if someone lingers on your property too long or tries to steal a package off your porch, the cameras will make a startling noise. 

If you’re thinking of getting a Vivint camera or two, it’s worth considering the Vivint Smart Drive. (Don’t confuse this with the Vivint Control Panel, which serves as the security system base and smart hub for your devices.)

The smart drive is basically a DVR for your cameras. It allows you to store security footage longer, which is helpful. But the real virtue is the continuous recording.

That’s right! With the Smart Drive, your cameras will record all the time, not just when a motion event sets them off. That way, the cameras won’t accidentally miss something (which, sadly, happens with even the best security camera brands).

As far as we can tell, even when you have the Smart Drive, you have to pay the monthly per-camera fee. So the drive won’t save you any money, especially since you have to pay for it along with your other equipment, but it’s still useful.

Basically, any time anything happened with the vehicle, we immediately knew.

We loved the security we felt in knowing that if the car got damaged or stolen, we’d, one,  immediately be notified and, two, be able to track its location. Not to mention the convenient maintenance info! The Car Guard feature will cost around $199 for the equipment, and you'll pay $10 per month for one vehicle. For any additional device, you'll pay another $5 per month. 

We cover the Vivint cameras pretty thoroughly in our Vivint cameras review, so we won’t get too deep into that here. But we did want to call out that Vivint has all three camera staples: an indoor, outdoor, and doorbell camera.

Spoiler alert: the Vivint Doorbell Camera Pro is our favorite Vivint camera. It has people and package detection, a super-wide field of view, and a feature for protecting your mail from porch pirates. Vivint also just barely started selling the doorbell as a standalone device, so you don’t have to get a full Vivint system to use it.

In addition to its proprietary smart home devices, Vivint has quite a bit of compatibility.

Vivint has three smart home integrations:

• Amazon Alexa
• Google Assistant
• Z-Wave

With Alexa, you need to download two different skills to get full command of the smart home and security system, whereas Google requires just one integration with the system.

In both cases, though, you’ll have to practice specific wording to get the systems to do what you want. And note that while you can arm your Vivint system with voice control, you can’t disarm it without physically entering your code.

Vivint also works with most Z-Wave devices, which allows it to connect to some of the leading smart home brands.

While we’d also love to see some IFTTT or Zigbee compatibility, you’ll be able to get most smart home functionality with Vivint’s existing connectivity.

The Vivint app (once known as the Vivint Sky app) comes with every level of professional Vivint monitoring. With the app, you can arm and disarm your system, turn your smart devices on and off, look at your camera feeds, and check on your car (if you have Car Guard).

You can also use the app to set up smart home chains, similar to the ones you create with IFTTT. For instance, you can create a setting so that when your car arrives at your home address, the lights turn on and the door unlocks. This is the kind of functionality that sets Vivint Smart Home apart compared to other security offerings.

Vivint requires professional installation, which means you won’t have to use a screwdriver or wire a camera to get Vivint in your home. But you will have to pay $99 and set aside a good amount of time.

Vivint offers consultations with a professional who will decide what equipment you need and where. We didn’t follow the usual consultation process, but to our understanding, the consultation and professional installation are done separately.

We did go through the typical installation process. Vivint told us our tech would arrive somewhere between 8 a.m. and noon. After the tech arrived, installation took another four-ish hours.

Luckily, the tech showed up close to the beginning of the window. If he’d arrived on the noonish side of things, the installation process would have eaten up a whole workday. That’s not great news if you have an inflexible schedule!

Overall, the installation process went pretty smoothly. The technician took most of our concerns into account when placing the equipment. But he was adamant about installing the outdoor camera in a location where we already had cameras instead of placing it in an area without camera coverage we’d picked out. And while he may have had a good reason for that, he didn’t clearly explain it.

If you have any plans to move in the future, you will have to pay an additional fee of $129 to get your system reinstalled, which can be a bit frustrating. 

If you're all about that professional installation and don't want to lift a finger to install your system, Vivint is great at taking care of it for you. If you want a more DIY approach, Vivint may not be the best option and we'd recommend a different company that is known for its DIY equipment like Ring, Cove or SimpliSafe. 

Vivint has had a lot of ups and downs over the years and has had something of a rocky reputation for a while.

When customers have good experiences with Vivint, they seem to be extremely good. But when they have bad experiences . . . let’s just say the pendulum swings severely in the opposite direction.

As discussed in this Vivint review, the alarm system is very smart and relatively easy to use, and users love that. But Vivint suffers from repeated complaints about the following:

• Deceptive sales tactics, such as inaccurate initial estimates or misrepresentations of Vivint’s contract terms
• Contract confusion, such as contracts being renewed without the user’s express permission
• Frustrating experiences when trying to move or cancel 

Vivint has taken considerable strides in improving its reputation, and we commend the company for that. But we still see complaints about these issues more often than we would like to.

We will say this for Vivint’s customer service—it’s done by actual Vivint staff.

That seems like it should be a given. But a lot of security companies outsource their customer service centers, so the person you’re talking to doesn’t even work for the security company.

Everyone at Vivint—from the installation techs to the customer service reps to the monitoring staff—actually does work for Vivint, which should make things a bit more cohesive.

If you went with a company like ADT, it’s really hard to tell who the person you’re talking to works for or who’s doing your installation. (Most of the time, it’s not ADT itself.)

Vivint is more expensive than most security systems, but it does offer a no-contract option. Plus its smart home support is simply unparalleled in the industry.

There’s a reason Vivint is one of our top-recommended systems.

While it costs a lot and has some work to do to improve its customers’ buying experience, it has excellent equipment and smart home compatibility.

• Pricing: Vivint’s proprietary equipment, monitoring, and smart home functionality all add up to quite a bit. To get the best value for your dollar, you need to be all in with a full security and smart home setup.
• Equipment: Vivint has some of the best equipment on the market. The proprietary products and their smart functions are what make Vivint a top system.
• Home automation: Vivint offers tons of smart home devices, and it integrates with even more.
• Installation: A Vivint representative will install your system for you. This service is $99.
• Customer experience: Vivint’s reputation with customers is a little bumpy due to some questionable past events, but it’s slowly improving itself.

If you’re still not sure about Vivint, check out our best home security systems.

One of our reviewers has been living with a Vivint system for almost a year. We also spent a significant amount of time on consumer review sites, Vivint’s site, and news sites that discuss Vivint’s legal battles.

When reviewing home security systems, we look at a lot of different aspects to decide how to rate and review that system. Those include:

• Price
• Monitoring types
• Equipment and equipment features
• Cameras and camera features
• Home automation
• Installation
• Customer service

Get answers to your lingering Vivint questions.