Best Baby Monitors Review 2022

Baby monitors have come a long way from the screechy handsets you might remember. Now, baby monitors can do everything from play lullabies to put on light shows, all while keeping an eye (or rather, a camera) on your sleeping baby.

But with so many options, it can be hard to know which monitor to choose. We’ve gone through the top models on the market to find the best types of monitors for your house and your kids, whether you want a full-on baby sleep center or just a multi-purpose indoor camera.

Netgear’s Arlo Baby was an easy pick for first place because almost every feature you want or could want is built into this one small package. It’s not just a baby monitor—if you also need a white noise machine, a nightlight, or a temperature monitor, Arlo Baby has you covered. The only thing we don’t love about Arlo Baby is the price.

Arlo Baby doesn’t stop at the camera. Netgear has built a bunch of features  right into the monitor that benefit both you and your baby.

Arlo Baby’s nursery features:

• Nightlight
• Lullaby/white noise player
• Temperature sensor
• Air quality monitor
• Character outfits

If your baby likes to watch a light show while they fall asleep, you can turn on Arlo Baby’s color-changing nightlight. You can also play a lullaby to sing your baby to sleep, or sing them to sleep yourself with a recording of your own voice.

Arlo lets you dress up the monitor in a few different character outfits: puppy, bunny, or kitten. So if your kiddo has a favorite critter, the Arlo Baby can match.

Our personal favorite feature is the temperature sensor. You can check on your baby and check the temperature in their room at the same time. The air quality monitor is a nice touch, but it’s not super informative. It tells you only  if the air quality is “Normal,” “Abnormal,” or “Very Abnormal.”

The monitor’s air quality monitor can detect carbon monoxide, but Arlo says not to rely on it as your sole CO sensor. If you really want to watch for carbon monoxide, we recommend using a dedicated CO detector.

Arlo gives you seven days’ worth of free cloud storage for the Arlo Baby—or up to 1 GB. That’s better than the Nest Cam, which gives you only three hours of stored history.

If you want more than the seven days Arlo gives you, you can subscribe to one of its monthly plans.

There’s no way around it: Arlo Baby is expensive. It might be packed with features, but you definitely pay for them. That said, it’s less expensive than a high-end indoor camera like the Nest Cam IQ Indoor, and it’s the same price as the regular Nest Cam.

You can definitely find a cheaper indoor camera that’s just as good as the camera on the Arlo Baby. A regular camera won’t have all those extra baby-specific features, but you can buy separate devices for those too and still pay less for them combined than you would for a single Arlo Baby monitor.

For example, if you want a camera that can pan and tilt and look around the room, then the Amcrest ProHD on Amazon is cheaper than the Arlo Baby. Amazon also has affordable white noise machines (view on Amazon) and night-lights (view on Amazon) galore.

But we love convenience, and we like having one easy device (and one easy app) that has all the features we need. The Arlo Baby is a jack-of-all-trades, and everything it does, it does well.

The Nest Cam is an indoor security camera, not specifically a baby monitor. But it can definitely function as a baby monitor if you want something that can do both.

Overall, Nest Cam wouldn’t be our first choice for a dedicated baby monitor because it lacks a lot of nursery-specific features, like always-on audio. But as a multi-use camera, it works pretty well.

One main reason for choosing the Nest Cam as a baby monitor over other indoor cameras was its mount options.

You can put this thing almost anywhere:

• Metal surfaces
• Flat surfaces
• Tripods
• Wall mounts

You can even remove the Nest Cam’s camera head from its stand and put it somewhere discreet if you want to use it as a nanny cam.

The other reason why we chose Nest Cam to work as a baby monitor is its quality as an overall camera. With 1080p recording, its image quality is crystal clear, and its audio and talk features are loud enough to hear easily.

Plus, the Nest app is intuitive and easy to use—and if you use other Nest products like the learning thermostat, the Nest Cam fits right into your existing system.

While the Nest Cam is a great indoor cam, it’s not ideal as a dedicated baby monitor. The camera notifies you about movement and sound inside your house, but you can’t have the camera’s audio always playing, like you’d need with a baby monitor—especially not if the app is closed or your phone is locked.

You can get push notifications that let you know if your baby moves or makes noises, which is great if they’re just taking a nap. But if you want something that will wake you up at night when your baby cries, a push notification probably won’t cut it.

The Nest Cam itself is a bit pricey, but where things can get expensive is with its Nest Aware subscription plans.

If you want access to Nest Cam’s top features, like motion zones, then you have to subscribe to a Nest Aware plan. And if you’re using the Nest Cam as a baby monitor, then you definitely do want motion zones. They let you specify which areas to watch for movement, like your baby’s crib.

Nest does have a $5-per-month option, so Nest Aware is more affordable now than it used to be when the price started at 10 bucks per month. But it’s still asking you to pay extra for features that other cameras (like the Arlo Pro 4) include for free.

If you’ve heard horror stories on the news about hackers breaking into Wi-Fi baby monitors, then you might prefer a monitor that doesn’t use your Wi-Fi network at all. The Infant Optics DXR-8 operates on radio frequencies, giving you a more secure connection than a Wi-Fi monitor can.

Aside from its security features, the Infant Optics DXR-8 is a decent little device. The camera can pan and tilt, and most impressively, it comes with interchangeable lenses and an included optical zoom lens. The monitor also gives you a pretty good (albeit small) display, with temperature sensors and easy controls.

The Infant Optics DXR-8 definitely has the user in mind. The monitor uses a micro USB charging port, so you can recharge it using any micro USB cord you have lying around and not just the specific cord that came with the monitor.

This monitor’s display is also super easy to use. There are intuitive buttons that let you move the camera around so you can see every inch of your nursery, and the nursery’s temperature is clearly displayed at the top of the screen. Infant Optics also includes a mounting bracket so you can put the camera on a wall if you don’t have a handy flat surface near the crib.

Like we said, the camera comes with an optical zoom lens included, which is great if you want to get an up-close view of your sleeping baby. You can also order a super wide 170º lens on Amazon for $11.98 if you want to set the camera in a single corner of a large room and still see the whole space.

The Infant Optics’s display struggles a bit with battery life. It actually lasts pretty long, but the charge can be unpredictable. Our battery still said it had a quarter charge left when the display died, so you don’t really know when the battery’s low and when it’s empty. That’s not ideal if you put your kid down for a nap and suddenly the portable display dies.

The monitor display works well for its purpose, but it’s not the best image quality we’ve seen. You can see the baby clearly, but the display is pretty small, so you don’t get every tiny detail. If you want an ultra clear picture we’d go with something like the Samsung BrightVIEW.

Just like the Infant Optics DXR-8, the Samsung BrightVIEW works on radio frequencies, not Wi-Fi, so you don’t have to worry about hackers invading the privacy of your nursery. And unlike the Optics DXR-8, the Samsung BrightVIEW has a pretty stunning little monitor display.

That said, it’s called the BrightVIEW for a reason: its display is 70% of the appeal. But if what’s most important to you is a secure monitor and seeing every detail of your baby’s sleeping face, then the Samsung BrightVIEW works pretty well.

The Samsung’s camera itself records in 800 x 480 resolution and has full pan-and-tilt function, so you can look up, down, and around the nursery without leaving your bed. But the real star of the show is the monitor’s display. At five inches wide, it’s bigger than most baby monitor displays, and you can clearly see your baby, even in night vision mode.

Sadly, while the display is the star of the show with Samsung BrightVIEW, its touchscreen controls are not. The touchscreen is not super responsive, so you have to press multiple times before it will select the button you want, and it’s just generally clunky to use.

The settings menu also gives you childish icons instead of clear labels, which is probably meant to be cute but just ends up being annoying. Your kid will probably never look at the settings menu, but you will, so it would be nice to have everything designed for adults.

We also wish the Samsung BrightVIEW included a temperature sensor, like the Infant Optics DXR-8 does. Overall, though, the Samsung works fine for parents who want a non-Wi-Fi monitor with good image quality.

Audio monitors will almost always be cheaper than video monitors, so if you want to hear every sound your baby makes without spending over $100, then the VTech DM221 is the way to go. We love the crystal clear sound quality and the two-way talk function, although we wish the range was longer.

The VTech DM221 might not give you a video view of your sleeping baby, but it does give you one feature most cameras have: two-way talk. You can use the VTech like a walkie-talkie to talk to your baby without actually going in the nursery.

We like that the two-way talk function gives you an easy way to soothe your kid without waking them up more by going into the nursery. And the sound quality is clear both on your end and the nursery’s.

VTech says the DM221 has a 160-foot indoor range, but we weren’t able to get more than about 100 feet without the connection getting choppy.

We wish the VTech had a longer range, but it does at least have an out-of-range alert so you know if the monitor is having trouble reaching the nursery. And if you have a super open floor plan without a lot of walls between you and the baby, the monitor will likely perform better.

Do you use a baby monitor in your nursery? Tell us about your experience in the comments!