Frontpoint vs. SimpliSafe Security Review

If you have your house decked out in smart lights, with smart plugs in every outlet and a smart opener on your garage door, then SimpliSafe is not the system for you. You’d be better off choosing Frontpoint, which has a ton of different smart home integrations that will support your ever-evolving robot house.

That said, SimpliSafe is super affordable, while Frontpoint is a bit expensive. So for the budget-minded, non-robot-house-havers among you, SimpliSafe is a solid choice.

We also like that Frontpoint offers a wide range of equipment, including smart home devices. You can get all the standard home security sensors (door and window sensors, motion sensors, etc.) while also getting environmental sensors (think smoke detectors and flood sensors), and things like smart lightbulbs.

Plus, Frontpoint’s touchscreen control panel lets you manage everything through a tablet-like screen instead of an analog keypad. (But you can get an analog keypad instead if you want to.)

Frontpoint’s starter equipment packages might be cheap, but its monitoring plans will set you back a bit. Frontpoint monitoring starts at $44.99 per month, while the average price for professional monitoring is more like $40. For comparison, Vivint’s most expensive monitoring plan costs the same as Frontpoint’s cheapest.

That said, Frontpoint saves you so much money on equipment that your monthly cost might still come out cheaper than the likes of Link Interactive or even Google Nest Secure.

SimpliSafe’s great if you care about your bottom line, but if you want to build a lot of smart home devices into your house, then there are better options out there.

Even though SimpliSafe sells a couple smart devices of its own (namely a smart lock), it doesn’t support any sort of third-party smart home protocol. It doesn’t have Z-Wave, Zigbee, or Thread, and it doesn’t have many third-party integrations that let you add in extra devices.

SimpliSafe does work with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, so you at least have some voice control. As smart stuff goes, that’s about it.

If you want to secure your house for as little money as possible, then SimpliSafe is an easy choice. You’ll get affordable equipment and cheap monthly monitoring for a system that still looks and works quite well.

If you’d rather get higher-end equipment and you want to add some smart home devices, then Frontpoint’s for you. Just know you’ll be paying a higher price for your monthly monitoring service.

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