Frigate alternative
Frigate is free, open source and very good. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
This page is for people who have outgrown a single node — a second site, operators who need their own logins, an alarm workflow, someone to phone. If that is not you, Frigate is probably the right answer and you should keep using it.
Frigate costs nothing, runs unlimited cameras, and you can read every line of it. Valdexia is commercial software, licensed per channel from sixteen channels up. On price there is no argument to have, and a comparison page that tried to manufacture one would deserve the reception it got. This page is about the day one node stops being enough.
It is also a genuinely well-made piece of software with a fast release cycle. Anyone still describing Frigate by what it could not do a year ago is working from stale notes — 0.16 added licence plate recognition, face recognition and user roles, closing gaps that comparison pages across the internet are still claiming exist. Our own internal comparison said the same thing and was wrong by the time we came to write this.
So the honest question is not which is better. It is narrower: at what point does a single-node, community-supported, config-file-driven system stop fitting the job? That point is real, it arrives for some people and never for others, and it is what the rest of this page is about.
Reflecting Frigate as of the 0.16 generation, not the Frigate of a year ago.
| Frigate | Valdexia | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost and licence | Free and open source, unlimited cameras. Frigate+ is an optional paid subscription for model training. | Commercial, and quoted rather than published: one base licence per system plus a perpetual channel per camera, from sixteen channels, with no per-server licence. A 7-day demo licence for 10 cameras runs the whole product first. Source is not published. |
| Scale across machines | A single instance per server. More sites, or more cameras than one machine can carry, means separate independent installations, each with its own interface. | Distributed by design from Professional upward: multiple recording servers under one management interface, one camera tree, one search, with federated multi-site and automatic failover between recorders on Enterprise. |
| Organising many cameras | A flat camera list, which is the right shape for a house or one building. | A region → city → area → site tree. Permissions, retention and reporting all hang off it, which is what multi-site estates need and single sites do not. |
| Users and permissions | Admin and viewer roles, with custom roles scoped to named cameras in recent builds. Real access control, and a recent addition. | Role-based access scoped to the location tree, so a branch manager sees their site and a contractor sees one gate, plus a hash-chained audit log recording who viewed, exported and changed what. |
| Licence plates and faces | Both, since 0.16, running locally after a one-time model download. Plate matching against a configured list can drive notifications. | Both, included in Professional and Enterprise, with plate dedup, a vehicle classifier and scheduling. |
| Alarms and response | Notifications and a review queue for alerts and detections. | An alarm manager: definitions, standard operating procedures with checklists, acknowledge and close lifecycle, escalation levels with per-level notification routing, and an external alarm API for fence energisers and I/O. |
| Configuration | A YAML config file as the source of truth, with a growing amount of it editable in the UI. | Configured in the web interface, with a REST API behind it. No file to edit and no container to restart to change a zone. |
| Deployment and support | A Docker container, documented thoroughly, supported by a large and active community. | An installer and systemd services on Ubuntu, from a mini PC to a server rack. Business-hours support included with Valdexia Current; Premium 24/7 with a one-hour critical response available. |
Frigate details reflect the 0.16 generation as documented by the project in October 2026. It moves quickly — check the current documentation before relying on any row here, including the ones in our favour.
Not feature envy. Specific situations where a single node stops fitting.
A workshop, a branch, a second property. Two Frigate installations mean two interfaces, two searches and two sets of notifications, and nobody has a view of both. One management interface over several recorders is a different architecture, not a bigger version of the same one.
The moment the system has operators rather than an owner, you need logins scoped to what each person should see, an alarm each of them can acknowledge and close, and a record of who looked at what. That last one tends to arrive as a question from HR or a lawyer rather than as a feature request.
A community forum is extraordinary value and it is not an SLA. When a site is contractually monitored, somebody has to be obliged to answer the phone at two in the morning, and that obligation is what you are buying.
No. Valdexia is commercial, compiled, and self-hosted — the software and all your footage run on your own hardware with nothing uploaded, but the source is not published. If open source is a requirement rather than a preference, Frigate is the answer and this page will not change that.
For a single server at a house, no — Frigate is free, unlimited and purpose-built for that, and we would rather you used it than paid us for something you do not need. The differences that matter start when there is more than one recorder, more than one site, more than one operator, or a contract that requires someone to answer the phone.
No, and it is worth correcting because a lot of comparison pages still say otherwise. Frigate 0.16 added licence plate recognition and face recognition, both running locally. We have those too, but it is not a gap in Frigate any more.
Frigate runs as a single instance. Covering several sites, or more cameras than one machine can handle, means separate independent installations with separate interfaces. Valdexia is distributed from Professional upward: several recording servers under one management interface, one camera tree and one search across all of them, with automatic failover between recorders on Enterprise.
Plenty of people do, and it is a sensible way to evaluate. Cameras publish RTSP and a second consumer subscribing to a second stream is routine, so you can point Valdexia at the same cameras Frigate is already recording and compare them on your own footage before changing anything. A demo licence covers ten cameras for seven days, extended on request if the evaluation needs longer.
A demo licence runs the whole product for 7 days on up to 10 cameras, with nothing switched off and no card. Point it at the cameras you already own and see what it does before anything changes — and if a week or ten cameras is not enough to prove it, say so and we will issue a licence that fits the evaluation.