The slight downside is that the higher quality comes with a steeper price. Vivint is more expensive than competing professionally installed systems—although not by much even when compared to DIY solutions with less quality. Fortunately, you can spread the payments over 42 to 60 months with zero interest. Vivint also allows you to pay off equipment costs in a lump sum to reduce monthly bills and avoid getting locked into a long-term contract. With that said, take a look at our full review of the service below, from ordering, to installation, to functionality and more to see how it all works.
Ordering
Buying a Vivint system typically begins with a phone call about your security goals. A sales representative will also inquire about the layout of your home and your desire for automated features such as a smart lock, thermostat, and controllable lighting. That’s when you’ll make a preliminary selection of sensors, devices, and a monthly monitoring plan. You can also ask Vivint to send a “Smart Home Pro” to your house for a free in-person consultation. This allows you to follow a thoughtful planning process to select the necessary equipment. Be advised that the Vivint phone agent and the Smart Home Pro earn commissions. Customers have three days after installation to return the entire system and 30 days after installation to return individual products. You should also know that Vivint supplements its salesforce with authorized dealers. However, Vivint dealers sell equipment and services at the same price as what’s offered directly by the company. And in a major distinction from other security companies, Vivint is always solely responsible for the lifetime customer relationship, including installation, service, support, and professional monitoring.
Installation
On the scheduled day of the installation, the technician arrived at about 15 minutes early. He took an entire hour to walk us through the process of installing the selected equipment. “My job is to secure your home,” he said. “Let’s put in security first and the toys afterward,” referring to optional smart locks and voice assistants. We walked through each room to confirm which doors, windows, and hallways should be protected. The installer advised us about what he called “a smart second line of defense,” such as placement of a glass-break sensor where someone might smash a window rather than prying open a door. Vivint technicians—who are employees of the company, not contractors—go through a rigorous education process. Vivint’s components have solid construction. Their design is attractive. Our sole gripe was that the door sensors are only available in white. We would have preferred a color to blend in with our natural wood. Smart door locks come in bronze, satin nickel, and polished brass. Vivint purposefully does not offer an expansive catalog of hundreds of sensors, cameras, locks, and thermostat. It’s what Jeremy Warren, Vivint’s Chief Technology Officer, told us is a “curated ecosystem” for tight integration and quality control. The installer led me through the process of naming each device (e.g., bedroom sliding door, dining room light, etc.) and he provided a tutorial for how everything works. But the lion’s share of his time was spent conducting diagnostics to ensure that the control hub, sensors, cameras, devices, and the smart lock have robust communications to one another. In a mature, formal procedure, Vivint assigns a score to the system’s multiple radio frequencies, Wi-Fi, and cell signals. The hub offers further diagnostics and self-testing tools, so you know everything is working. Over two months, we received several app notifications when a device needed to have a battery replaced or went offline for other reasons. (We find these messages reassuring because we’ve read many horror stories about consumers finding out that an alarm system isn’t working only after an intrusion.) We believe that lighting is an essential part of home security. While Vivint sells a plug-in device to control outlets, as well as Hue smart light bulbs, these devices stop working if an appliance’s switch (or the wall control) is inadvertently turned off. The solution is to replace your current light control with a smart switch from Lutron, Wink, or Wemo. However, Vivint technicians are not licensed electricians. So while they can drill holes and mount cameras and doorbells, they do not change in-wall switches—leaving it to an electrician or DIY consumer to make the upgrade.
How It Works
There are two primary ways that users interact with a Vivint system—the Smart Hub and a smartphone mobile app. Some users prefer a control panel placed near the front door, while others like using the phone app. The choice is up to you. In both the control panel and app, the home screen is labeled “Security.” From a glance, you can see if the system is set to Disarmed, Armed Staying, or Armed Away. The home screen also provides a status of any doors or windows that are open. That gives you the option to walk around the house, closing everything—until you get a message reading, “Everything looks good. Your home is ready to arm.” Or you can decide to set the alarm to bypass any open door or window for the duration of that armed session. The home screen also allows you to see the status of smart locks—and with a single touch, lock, or unlock doors. The Security screen on the app offers a way to sound the alarm immediately. And a similar “+” button on the hub provides a way to trigger panic, emergency, or fire immediately. By holding the Fire button down for two seconds, the monitoring center immediately dispatches the fire department. Holding down the Panic button sounds the Smart Hub siren and contacts the monitoring center—while the Emergency button contacts the monitoring center without sounding the siren. We were advised by Vivint to use the Emergency button to evaluate the monitoring center’s response time. We conducted this test twice. In each case, we were speaking with the monitoring center via the hub in about 10 to 15 seconds. (Don’t worry, we explained that it was a false alarm to the representative.) The next navigation icon is Cameras, allowing you to see live and recorded video events—and to turn privacy mode on and off. A clock icon for Activity links to a running log of every activity—doors opening and closing, motion sensors picking up movement, and people detected walking in front of the house. The hub allows you to individually customize the notification sound for every action—with a door chime, piano riff, or other sound effects. So you know which door opened without looking up. Similarly, a subtle green light is emitted from the bottom of the hub when all the doors and windows are closed, and the system is ready to arm. The power (and fun) of the Vivint system comes from setting up “Custom Actions” that connect one device to another. Here are examples of functions you can set up:
Turn on specified lights when entering the house.Automatically disarm the system after punching in the code to the smart lock.Alarm or disarm the system at a specific time or sunset/sunrise.
One of the smartest applications of a custom action is to use the siren built into an outdoor camera when an alarm is triggered. So in addition to sounding the hub’s 100-decibel siren inside your house, the outdoor camera’s siren will blast a warning to the neighborhood. It’s one of many examples of how multiple devices can combine with one another. And Vivint recently started selling a Car Guard that easily plugs into a car’s dashboard port. If Car Guard detects the car being disturbed in your driveway, it can tell your outdoor camera to start recording. Again, these “custom actions” are built-in. Therefore, they don’t require a complicated if-this-then-that equation. They are powerful but can be set up quickly and easily. Perhaps the highest praise for Vivint’s system is how quickly its operation becomes second nature.
Best Features
Reliable Communications: When you’re shopping for a home security system, it’s easy to get distracted by things such as voice assistants, Bluetooth speakers, and automated rainbow-colored light shows. But none of it matters for security if you don’t have reliable, lightning-fast connections between your devices and the monitoring center. That’s why our favorite Vivint feature is the company’s underlying, redundant communications strategy. Many competing systems use your existing Wi-Fi network as the backbone. But Vivint goes several steps further. But how? Vivint added extra ports to our router, including one for a Power Line Communications (PLC) connection between the Internet and the Vivint Smart Hub. PLC uses a home’s electrical wiring to send data. The outdoor camera also ties into PLC, essentially creating a wired system for devices far away from the hub. In some cases, Vivint uses Ethernet connections to reduce interference for cameras placed on the edge of a home. Other added ports created hard links to the 24/7 hard-drive for video recordings and a bridge for Philips Hue lightbulbs. And critically, the Vivint Smart Hub uses its own dedicated Wi-Fi network rather than piggybacking on yours. Here’s why these steps matter. A few weeks after the installation, we discovered locking or unlocking our Kwikset smart lock took about 20 seconds to work. So the Vivint technician returned to add signal repeaters for both the hub’s main 345-MHz radio signals and the 900-MHz Z-Wave network, the protocol used for connecting many third-party devices. Based on these strategies, the response time on the smart lock was reduced to about one second. On the same visit, he updated the firmware of the Vivint Outdoor camera, which sped up the talk function for more effortless conversations with people at the door. Vivint Outdoor Camera Pro and AI-Based Smart Sentry: In April 2019, Vivint introduced a new outdoor camera—and it’s fantastic. It has 4K Ultra HD capability, with high dynamic range and a field of view is 140 degrees. With a pinch, we were able to zoom into the scene with minimal loss in detail. Two far-field microphones with echo canceling provided clear audio. It’s was also equipped with two-way talk and a siren. The camera offers a Smart Sentry function that sends a smartphone notification when it detects somebody lurking in the driveway. To avoid false alarms, we used the app to draw boundaries to establish where I want the camera to look or disregard. The camera’s built-in intelligence can differentiate between a human being and a passing car or swaying tree. If it detects a person, a sound is emitted, and a ring of red light illuminates around the lens. The effect is that intruders look up just in time for a photo to be snapped and sent to our phone. When we clicked on the notification, we were brought into the camera section of the app. And because we had the Smart Drive, we were able to rewind the footage to see the entire scene of a person approaching and leaving. Each detected action is marked on the timeline with a little white dot for easy identification. Without the Smart Drive, you get 14 days of clip storage per camera in Vivint’s cloud. The clip length for the Vivint Outdoor Camera is up to 90 seconds. Clips from the doorbell camera and Ping indoors are 30 and 20 seconds respectively.
Price and Fees
The Vivint starter kit costs $599. It includes the Vivint Smart Hub, two door/window sensors, one motion sensor, and a credit for $100 worth of additional sensors. For our system, we added this list of security gear:
7 additional door/window sensors: $350 ($50 each)1 additional motion detector: $1002 glass break detectors: $200 ($100 each)Vivint Outdoor Camera Pro: $399
If we had left our order there, it would be about $1,650—similar to an average Vivint order. But we went a little crazy, pushing our order to $3,173 with these items:
2 Vivint Ping indoor cameras: $398 ($199 each)Vivint Doorbell Camera: $249Vivint Smart Drive: $2491 CO detector: $1001 additional water sensor: $501 smoke detector: $100Kwikset smart door lock: $1794 lamp modules: $200 ($50 each)
The Vivint Smart Home monthly service plan is $39.99 plus $5 per camera, which includes 14 days of clip storage per camera. If you have a Vivint Smart Drive, the same pricing per camera provides 24/7 recording of up to four cameras. We recommend the Smart Drive, even at a relatively pricey $249, because it provides a quick experience of viewing and rewinding. Vivint also offers a monthly Smart Security monitoring service for $19.99, also requiring purchase of the all equipment. It’s for a basic system that does not include cameras or home automation. Vivint says that only about 5% of its customers choose this option.
The Competition: Vivint vs. ADT
Vivint is a professionally installed security system. Therefore, it should only be compared to other full-service systems like ADT, Brinks, and Xfinity Home—rather than DIY products. Unlike ADT, the most popular home-security service, Vivint designs and makes nearly every product that it sells, resulting in a consistently higher-quality product and service. ADT bundles equipment with its services, so in most cases a relatively high monthly fee is charged indefinitely. On the other hand, Vivint separates the cost of equipment to reduce the monthly expense after the gear is fully purchased. Vivint is the no-brainer choice for the most reliable, trustworthy, and full-featured home security system and monitoring service. With smart features, custom security actions such as being able to sound alarms from exterior cameras, and near fail-proof power line communication between the Internet and the Hub, Vivint offers worry-free protection for your home.
