Vivint Smart Home Security Review

We spent nearly two months testing the Vivint home security system and found it to be the best option currently on the market. First, it's effective and offers solid connectivity. Second, its control panel and mobile apps are user-friendly and fun to use. And it doesn't hurt that dedication to the customer experience guides Vivint’s selection of devices—the suite of components you need for a complete solution of home security and automation.

The slight downside is that a higher quality system comes with a steeper price. Vivint is more expensive than competing professionally installed systems—although not by much, even when compared to lesser-quality DIY solutions. 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.

Take a look at our full review of the service below, including ordering, installation, functionality, and more, to see how it all works.

Vivint Smart Home Security: 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 whether you want 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, which can help you through 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.

Vivint Smart Home Security: Installation

On the scheduled day of the installation, the technician arrived 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.

Vivint technicians are employees of the company, not contractors, and they undergo a rigorous education process. 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 the placement of a glass-break sensor where someone might smash a window, rather than pry open a door.

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 thermostats. 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 provided a tutorial for how everything works. But he spent most of his time conducting diagnostics to ensure that the control hub, sensors, cameras, devices, and the smart lock had robust communications with 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 a battery replacement or if it 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 lightbulbs, 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. Although they can drill holes and mount cameras and doorbells, they do not change in-wall switches. You'll need an electrician to make the upgrade, or you can DIY it.

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 yours.

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 the status of any doors or windows that are open. That gives you the option to walk around the house and close them until you get a message that reads, “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 then, with a single touch, lock or unlock doors.

The Security screen on the app offers a way to sound an alarm immediately. And a similar “+” button on the hub provides a way to immediately trigger a panic, emergency, or fire alarm.

When you hold down the Fire button for two seconds, the monitoring center immediately dispatches the fire department. Pressing the Panic button sounds the Smart Hub siren and contacts the monitoring center, whereas 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 communicating directly with an agent at the monitoring center via the hub in about 10 to 15 seconds. (Don't worry; we explained that it was a false alarm.)

The next navigation icon is Cameras, which allows you to view 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, such as doors opening and closing, people walking in front of the house, and motion sensors picking up other kinds of movement.

The hub allows you to individually customize the notification sound for every action—with a door chime, piano riff, or another sound effect. Similarly, you know the doors and windows are closed and the system is ready to arm when a subtle green light is emitted from the bottom of the hub.

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 at 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 work together. Vivint recently started selling a Car Guard that easily plugs into a car’s dashboard port. If Car Guard detects a disturbance in your car when it's parked in your driveway, it can direct your outdoor camera to start recording.

The great part is that these “custom actions” are built in and don't require you to think through 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.

Vivint Smart Home Security: 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 among 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. The company added extra ports to our router, including one for a power line communications (PLC) connection between the internet and the Vivint Smart Hub. A PLC uses a home’s electrical wiring to send data. The outdoor camera also ties into the PLC, essentially creating a wired system for devices that are 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 that 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, the technician 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

Vivint offers an outdoor camera—and it’s fantastic, with 4K Ultra HD capability, high dynamic range, and a field of view of 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. The camera is 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 establish boundaries as to where we wanted the camera to look—or disregard. The camera’s built-in intelligence can tell the difference between a human being and a passing car and a swaying tree, for example. It emits a sound if it detects a person, and a ring of red light illuminates the circumference of the lens, just in time for an intruder to look up and have their photo snapped and sent to your phone.

When we clicked on the notification, we were brought into the app's camera section. And because we had the Smart Drive, we were able to rewind the footage 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 indoor cameras are 30 and 20 seconds respectively.

Price and Fees

The Vivint starter kit costs $599 and 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: $100
• 2 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 kept going, pushing our order to $3,173 with these items:

• 2 Vivint Ping indoor cameras: $398 ($199 each)
• Vivint Doorbell Camera: $249
• Vivint Smart Drive: $249
• CO detector: $100
• 1 additional water sensor: $50
• Smoke detector: $100
• Kwikset smart door lock: $179
• 4 lamp modules: $200 ($50 each)

The Vivint Smart Home monthly service plan is $40 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 $20, which also requires purchasing all of the 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 it charges a relatively high monthly fee indefinitely. On the other hand, Vivint separates the cost of equipment to reduce the monthly expense after the gear is fully purchased.

Final Verdict

Vivint Smart Home is one of the best systems to use to protect your home. It is a 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 Smart Hub, Vivint offers worry-free protection for your home.

Methodology

In order to fully understand a company's offerings and evaluate them, our research goes into deep detail before we even decide to try out a service ourselves. For Vivint, we spent two months using it. We look at product specifications, what the service entails, and what it does from a technical perspective. Ease of use is a critical factor when it comes to cutting-edge technology, in addition to customer support if something goes wrong with the equipment. Then, there are other elements to consider, such as looking at plans, communicating with customer service if need be, and reading through reviews. Pricing, fees, and contract details are evaluated, too.