Comparison
Keep the cameras already on the wall. Change the software underneath them.
Valdexia is a self-hosted video management system for ONVIF and RTSP IP cameras. It runs on your own Ubuntu server, from a mini PC to a server rack, AI object detection is in the licence rather than an add-on, and the licence is perpetual — one base licence per system, a channel per camera, and no per-server licence.
The quote is rarely a surprise in kind, only in size. A site grows from eighty cameras to two hundred, each one carries its own device licence, the support contract is a percentage of the licence total, and the analytics that made the system worth buying turn out to be priced per channel on top. None of that is hidden — it is simply how most of the industry has always worked.
The useful question at that point is not which VMS is best in the abstract. It is narrower: what would actually have to change on site to stop paying per camera? For most installations the answer is less than people expect. The cameras stay, the switches stay, the cabling stays, the storage stays. What changes is the software they stream into.
These pages lay out that comparison product by product, in terms you can check against each vendor's own published material.
The systems people most often move from, and what the move actually involves.
The enterprise standard: Windows Server, a device licence per camera, Care Plus on top, and analytics sold separately. Where the money goes and what carries over.
Read the comparison →Linux-native and well engineered, so the difference is not the operating system. It is AI sold per device, Windows underneath, and a desktop client to deploy.
Read the comparison →Windows-only, one PC, one cheap licence. Genuinely hard to beat at four cameras. Where it stops, and what to move to when it does.
Read the comparison →Also South African, also runs on Ubuntu, thirty years of installed base. The narrowest comparison here, and the one we had to be most careful writing.
Read the comparison →Free, open source and genuinely good. No price argument to make — this one is about the day a single node stops being enough.
Read the comparison →A VMS migration sounds like a rip-out. On an ONVIF site it is mostly a reconfiguration.
Any camera that speaks ONVIF or RTSP works — Hikvision, Dahua, Uniview, Axis, UniFi Protect, Bosch, Hanwha, Reolink and hundreds more. There is no approved-vendor list and no device licence, so the cameras on the wall stay on the wall.
Same switches, same VLANs, same PoE, same disks. Valdexia records to local SSDs with optional NAS pools behind them for long retention, so existing storage is reused rather than replaced.
Live walls, a timeline scrubber, saved views, PTZ, clip export and bookmarks all work the way an operator expects. The difference is that it is a browser tab, so there is nothing to install on a workstation and no client version to keep matched.
Valdexia is priced per site by camera count on Professional, and per recording server on Enterprise, with every software module included at both. Object detection, licence plate recognition, appearance search, heatmaps, video synopsis, anonymisation and face recognition are not add-ons — they are in the price, because splitting them out is how a predictable quote turns into an unpredictable one.
All prices are published in South African rand including VAT on the pricing page. There is no quote-only tier below Enterprise and no per-seat client licence at any tier.
And the evaluation is a real one: a demo licence runs the whole product for seven days on ten cameras with nothing switched off, and a longer or larger one on request. It exists so you can point it at the cameras you already own and judge it on your own footage before anything on site changes.
Almost always, yes. Valdexia connects over ONVIF and RTSP, which virtually every IP camera made in the last decade speaks, and there is no approved-hardware list. The cameras, cabling, switches and storage all stay; what changes is the software recording them.
No. It runs on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on x86, from a NUC-class mini PC up to a server rack. There are no Windows Server licences to buy and no desktop client to install, because the operator interface is a web browser.
No. Object detection, licence plate recognition, appearance search, heatmaps, video synopsis, anonymisation and face recognition are included in the Professional and Enterprise tiers rather than sold as per-channel add-ons. You need a GPU or an AI accelerator to run them, but no further licence.
On an ONVIF site, usually an afternoon: install on the new server, let it discover the cameras on the network, set recording and retention, and run both systems in parallel until you are satisfied. Historical footage in a previous VMS's proprietary format stays where it is — the usual approach is to keep the old recorder read-only until its retention period expires.
No. Valdexia is commercial software that you self-host. Those are two different things, and they are often confused: self-hosted means the software and all of your footage run on hardware you own, with nothing uploaded to anyone's cloud. It does not mean the source code is published.
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.