Methodology

Who publishes this site

Surveilbench is published by Secufor, the publisher ofNoviscan, a self-hosted video surveillance suite. We are not a neutral third party, and we don't pretend to be — but every claim on this site is checked against real hardware and real software we run ourselves, and every source is dated and cited.

How we score software

We evaluate VMS/NVR software against a fixed set of criteria, published alongside each review: self-hosting, encryption of cached media at rest, facial recognition, desktop/mobile/web parity, and whether remote access requires trusting a vendor's cloud. These are the criteria we think matter most for privacy and long-term control of your footage — and yes, they are criteria Noviscan was built around. Comparative advertising is legitimate when it's factual and verifiable; we aim to be exactly that.

A product only gets a "tested" verdict once we've actually installed and run it. Until then, it's marked "not yet benchmarked" — we do not publish scores based on marketing material or documentation alone.

How we choose criteria — and how we're funded

The criteria in our comparison tables are the ones we believe matter most for privacy and long-term control of your footage. They are also, openly, criteria Noviscan was designed around — so Noviscan scores well on them. That is legitimate comparative advertising, but it is not the same as an independent lab's verdict, and we don't want you to read it that way. Other axes matter too — open-source auditability, price, maturity, community size — and on those, other products lead; we say so on the home page and on Noviscan's own review.

Funding and affiliation. This site is published and funded by Secufor. We do not run affiliate links and we are not paid by any of the products we compare. Of the products compared here, Noviscan is the only one Secufor publishes or sells — and we disclose it everywhere it appears.

How we test cameras

Camera and camera-ecosystem reviews come from a physical test bench: units we bought ourselves, checked against official documentation and, where relevant, community sources — always dated and cited. For each platform we record who ends up paying for cloud usage, whether a local stream (RTSP/ONVIF) is available, and whether the vendor's cloud is safe to rely on at all.

Freshness

Software and camera ecosystems change — firmware updates break integrations, vendors change pricing, new versions ship. We revisit entries on a regular cadence and mark the date they were last verified on every review.

What we won't do

• We won't publish a numeric rating for a product we haven't actually run.
• We won't use unlicensed vendor photography — unlicensed images are replaced with a plain placeholder until we can source an official press kit.
• We won't fabricate aggregate ratings or fake reviews.