Milestone XProtect alternative
Same cameras. Same network. A bill that stops growing every time you add a lens.
Valdexia is a self-hosted VMS for ONVIF and RTSP cameras, running on Ubuntu rather than Windows Server, administered in a browser rather than a desktop client, with AI detection and plate recognition in the base price.
XProtect is a capable platform and most people who leave it are not leaving because it stopped working. They leave because of how it is counted. Milestone's own documentation is clear on the model: you need one device licence per hardware device with a camera that you want to add to the system, a few models need more than one, and video push from a phone needs a licence for each phone. The licence count therefore tracks the camera count exactly, for the life of the system.
On top of that sits Care Plus, the maintenance subscription that carries patches and feature updates. On XProtect Corporate it is not optional in the first year — resellers list it as mandatory across the whole installation, both the base licence and the device licences, for the first year after purchase.
Then there is the platform itself. Milestone's guidance for IT teams expects Windows Server for the management server, with the Management Client and Smart Client needing Windows 10 or later and the .NET Framework, and a dedicated graphics card recommended for the viewing client. Those are Windows licences, workstation specifications and a desktop rollout, all before a single camera is recorded.
Structural differences only — the things that do not change between quotes. The Milestone column describes the platform's documented requirements and licensing model.
| Milestone XProtect | Valdexia | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence counting | One device licence per hardware device, plus a base licence. Per their documentation a multi-sensor or panoramic camera on the supported list counts as one device however many lenses it has, and an encoder of up to 16 channels is one licence per encoder IP address. A few models consume more than one. Mobile video push needs a licence per phone or tablet. | One base licence per system, then one channel per recorded stream, once off and perpetual, with no recording server needing a licence of its own. A camera's high and low resolution streams are one channel on both sides — their FAQ puts it as “we count channels, not streams”. One difference worth knowing, plainly: their encoder exception gives you up to 16 analogue cameras for a single licence, which their FAQ describes as help for converting analogue systems. We have no equivalent — an encoder's inputs follow the same rule as any other view. On multi-lens cameras the two models now land close together: theirs is one licence per device however many views, ours is one channel for the device plus one for each extra view running AI detection, so a four-lens camera recording all four is one channel on both sides. If your site is built on encoders, get both quotes — we will tell you which way it lands. The mobile apps are free on every licence, on any number of phones, and AI object detection is in the channel licence on every camera. |
| Server operating system | Windows Server for the management server, per Milestone's own IT guidance. Windows licences are a separate cost from the VMS. | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on x86, management server and recorders alike. No operating system licence to buy. |
| Operator client | Smart Client installed on each workstation — Windows 10 or later, .NET Framework, dedicated graphics card recommended. A web client is available alongside it. | A browser. Live view, playback, search and administration are all the same web interface, with no install on the operator's machine and no client version to keep matched to the server. Native iOS and Android apps are included on every tier. |
| Video analytics | Supplied by third-party analytics partners and priced separately, typically per channel, on top of the device licences. | Object detection, licence plate recognition, appearance search, heatmaps, video synopsis, anonymisation and face recognition are all included in Professional and Enterprise. One mid-range NVIDIA GPU handles 150+ cameras. |
| Maintenance | Care Plus, bought per licence, and mandatory across a whole Corporate installation in its first year. | The licence is once off and every update in the generation you bought is free, for everyone. Valdexia Current is optional and adds the next generation, remote access and priority support. |
| Where footage lives | On your own servers — XProtect is self-hosted too, which is one of the things that makes it a fair comparison. | On your own servers: local SSDs with optional NAS pools behind them. Nothing is uploaded to a cloud, and remote viewing is end-to-end encrypted. |
| Evaluation | XProtect Essential+ is free for a limited camera count on a single site. | A demo licence: the whole product for 7 days on up to 10 cameras, nothing switched off, and a longer or larger one on request for a real evaluation. No permanently free tier. |
Milestone's licensing and platform requirements above are drawn from Milestone's own published documentation and from authorised reseller listings, current at October 2026. Licensing terms change and differ by product edition and region — confirm the detail with Milestone or your partner before making a decision on either product.
The pricing page carries a worked comparison at 300 cameras with AI detection and plate recognition: around R560,000 for a traditional VMS once camera licences, the base licence, an analytics plug-in and an LPR plug-in are added up, against R119,800 a year for Valdexia Enterprise across two recording servers with every module included. Competitor figures there are converted from published USD list prices before tax, while the Valdexia figure includes VAT, so the real gap is wider than the headline.
That arithmetic matters less than its shape. In a per-device model every camera you add is a licence you buy and then keep paying maintenance on. In a per-site or per-server model, adding twenty cameras to an existing band costs nothing. Sites that grow are where the difference compounds.
This is the size where the two licence models stop resembling each other — not because our rate is lower, though it is, but because of what gets counted and what gets charged again every year. We quote rather than publish a rate card, the same as Milestone does. What follows is the structure, and theirs is the only rate card quoted on this page.
That 2,500-camera figure assumes AI detection on every single camera, at the 150-cameras-per-GPU density we run in production — it is the most expensive shape this can take, because the GPU is what sets the server count. Most estates of this size run detection on the cameras that need it rather than all of them, which means fewer servers for the same camera count. No extrapolated Milestone total is quoted here on purpose: a deal of this size is discounted off list, so multiplying their published rate by 2,500 would produce a number that is both wrong and unfair — which is exactly why the only figures above are structural ones and their own published maintenance rate. The comparison worth making is on your own quote, and it is one subtraction — see below.
Not the headline per-device rate. Ask for the all-in cost per camera over the life of the system: the device licence, plus the base licence, plus the maintenance percentage multiplied by however many years you expect to run it, plus the analytics you actually want, plus the Windows Server licences underneath. That is the number you will pay. It is rarely the number on the first page of the quote.
Two parts of it are worth isolating. Maintenance at 18.67% a year compounds into the largest line on a long-lived system — over ten years it exceeds the licence it was calculated from, and stopping it stops version upgrades altogether. And the analytics are quoted separately: on their own published list, plate recognition is $300 plus $1,295 a camera, and forensic review arrives with a hundred-channel minimum and its own GPU servers. On a 32-camera site that puts the analytics at roughly nine times their own VMS licence.
The second question is the one that bites later: ask what the next two hundred cameras cost. Under per-device licensing that is two hundred more licences plus maintenance on them for as long as the system exists, and another slice of analytics on top. Ours is two hundred channels at the same rate as the first sixteen, and no per-server licence however many recorders it takes.
Then send us the same specification — camera count, which cameras need plates or faces, how many years of updates you want — and we will quote against it line for line. On a like-for-like 32-camera site with plate recognition and full forensic review we come in around a tenth of the Milestone and BriefCam equivalent, and still 4.5 times under it at 200 cameras.
On an ONVIF site the work is measured in hours, not weekends.
Valdexia goes on a separate Ubuntu machine — or the same hardware, if you are re-purposing it later. Nothing touches the running XProtect system, so there is no window where the site is uncovered.
ONVIF discovery finds what is on the network and pulls stream URLs, resolutions and capabilities. Cameras stay configured exactly as they are; a second VMS subscribing to a second stream is normal for an IP camera.
Record on both for a week and compare on your own footage. When you are satisfied, leave the old recorder read-only until its retention expires and let it age out, rather than migrating historical video out of a proprietary format.
No, and the distinction matters. Valdexia is commercial software that you self-host: it runs entirely on hardware you own, with your footage on your disks and nothing uploaded to a cloud. That is what people usually mean when they search for an open source VMS, but it is not the same thing — our source code is not published.
Yes, if they speak ONVIF or RTSP, which covers virtually every IP camera of the last decade — Hikvision, Dahua, Uniview, Axis, Bosch, Hanwha, Avigilon, UniFi Protect and hundreds more. There is no device licence and no approved-hardware list, so nothing on the wall has to be replaced.
It stays there. Recorded video in any VMS's proprietary format is not practically portable between systems, so the normal approach is to keep the old recorder running read-only until its retention period expires, then decommission it. Clips you need to keep beyond that are exported as files before it goes.
No. It is built for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on x86, from a NUC-class mini PC up to a server rack. For most sites that removes a cost rather than adding a constraint, since the Windows Server licences a Milestone deployment needs are not part of the VMS quote.
No. Live view, playback, forensic search, alarms and administration are a web interface, so adding an operator is creating a login rather than rolling out a desktop client. There is no per-seat licence and no client build to keep version-matched to the server. Native iOS and Android apps are included on every tier as an extra way in.
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.