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Our furry friends are important members of the family, and leaving them at home while we go out to do people things can be hard. However, pet cameras—specifically designed to keep watch over dogs and cats—can make the human's absence from the home less stressful for both parties. If you've considered getting a pet camera, there's no better time than now.
Read our Best Indoor Security Cameras, Best Outdoor Security Cameras, Best Dog Tech and Accessories, Best Dog Beds, and Best Cat Tech and Supplies guides for more.
Updated December 2023: Eufy's Pet Camera Pro is our new top pick. We've added Furbo's cat-specific 360 camera, and options from Petcube and Catit. We've also updated prices and links throughout.
Table of ContentsSecurity Camera vs Pet CameraBest Pet Camera: Eufy Pet Camera Pro N140Runner-Up for Dogs: Furbo 360 Dog CameraRunner-Up for Cats: Furbo 360 Cat CameraBest Budget Camera: Wyze Cam Pan V3An Affordable Camera With Caveats: Petcube 360 CamAnother Camera We Like: Petcube Bites 2Honorable Mention
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Security Camera or Pet Camera?
Before getting into details about specific cameras, it's important to clarify the difference between pet cameras and your run-of-the-mill security camera.
Security cameras let you watch your pet while you're away from home, but pet cameras often have a few more pet-specific features that can make them more helpful. Some can dispense treats or allow you to interact with your dog or cat using your voice or a type of video chat. They can help address common issues like separation anxiety and boredom, which can lead to destroyed furniture, other kinds of property damage, or undue stress.
That's not to say that you can't use a security camera as a pet cam—we actually have a recommendation below that can help. Regardless of what you buy, you should take steps to secure the device. Like any other smart home device that connects to Wi-Fi, there's a chance it can be hacked and compromise your privacy. Make sure your Wi-Fi password is strong, set up two-factor authentication with your camera's app, and keep it updated. It's smart to keep it turned off when you're home, too.
Best Overall
Photograph: Eufy
Eufy Pet Camera Pro N140$210 at Amazon$210 at Eufy
We loved the older version of this camera, the D605 (9/10, WIRED Recommends). The N140 is just as great, with 2K video resolution versus 1080p. The design is nearly identical, though this one gets a light gray bottom, and there's a $10 difference in price. If you find the older version on a super sale, that's still a great choice. Both rotate 360 degrees, so you won't ever miss an important moment because it was just out of frame.
I love tossing treats to my pets while I'm away, and you can opt in to have those moments recorded. If you want a sound to play before tossing a treat, choose between a squeaky toy or up to three of your own audio recordings. You can also turn it off completely; my cats always hear the mechanism moving and come running anyway. The app lets you know when the treat reservoir is almost empty too, which is a nice addition, and it can be removed from the rest of the camera body and washed in the dishwasher.
The Eufy N140 is a little bit bigger than the Furbo cameras below, but not by a staggering amount—they're bigger than a typical security camera, given the addition of treat dispensing. Eufy has a leg up on the Furbo, though, thanks to local storage. You don't have to pay for any monthly subscription to get video history. Most other cameras only give you a live view or require an SD card if you don't want to subscribe. Here, you'll have video history for about 15 days, give or take how quickly your activity log fills up. If you are interested in professional monitoring and emergency dispatch, Eufy does have a few plans to consider (the brand also partners with our favorite personal safety app, Noonlight, to send dispatch to you).
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I especially love the daily diaries, which are sped-up, one-minute-long highlight reels of that day's activities. These can be admittedly sad when your pets spend most of the day waiting for you to get home, but you can still catch many cute moments and I'm glad they're available without an extra charge.
One thing we've noted about Eufy in the past is that the brand has different apps for different devices. So if your home already has a few Eufy cameras, this one has to be viewed using the separate Eufy Pet app. It's a small but annoying qualm, and if this is the only Eufy product you use, you won't know any different.
It's important to note that we stopped recommending Eufy for a short time after security breaches that its parent company Anker initially denied. The brand finally acknowledged and fixed the issues, and worked with a third-party company to audit its security. There's more information in our indoor security camera guide, and we currently recommend several of the brand's options. Any security camera is vulnerable to a hack, but if you're unsure, consider the Furbo below. —Medea Giordano
Runner-Up for Dogs
Photograph: Furbo
Furbo 360 Dog Camera$210 at Amazon$210 at Furbo
The Furbo 360 Dog Camera (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is another great option. It was our top pick, but Eufy's free storage is too hard to beat. If that's not an issue for you or you're still unsure if you want to trust Eufy, you won't be disappointed with Furbo. Like its immobile predecessor, this stylish pet camera also includes basics like two-way communication and bark notifications, and it even lets you toss a treat.
Most pet cameras have a wide field of view to see a large part of your room, but the ability to spin 360 degrees means you can monitor the whereabouts of your pup at any moment. Even better is the fact that it features Auto Dog Tracking, following them from one spot to the next so you don’t have to frantically search every time you open the app. This tracking can be tough if you have two dogs traipsing around, but I typically found that where one dog goes, the other tends to follow. If it’s nighttime or the room doesn’t have a lot of light, you can still see your fur babies in color night vision with the 1080p camera.
If this baseline monitoring and interaction isn’t enough, you have the option to subscribe to Furbo’s Dog Nanny service for $7 a month. It’ll snap selfies of your dog, send safety alerts about smoke or carbon monoxide and fallen objects—even chewing alerts—and can spot intruders too. All of these 15-second video clips are saved to the cloud, so you can review the situation as many times as you need, wherever you are.
The Furbo app itself leaves much to be desired. It’s easy to use but looks and feels lackluster. I also wish there was web access to the camera to easily share monitoring access with friends and family instead of having them download the app. —Haley Sprankle
Runner-Up for Cats
Photograph: Furbo
Furbo 360 Cat Camera$210 at Amazon$220 at Furbo
You don't need a camera specifically for dog or cats, but Furbo's newest 360 camera comes with a feather toy that appeals to cat friends. Along with a sleek black casing instead of shiny white, you get all the same specs as the dog camera above that we already love. It detects meows, not barks, and takes cat selfies instead of dog ones, but you get the idea. Whatever pet you're looking after, this camera will work, with 1080p video and two-way speakers.
It's fun to toss treats to my food-obsessed cats while I'm away. You can customize the sound it makes while doing so with either a bird chirp or by recording your own. You can't turn it off, though. I lowered the volume on the camera to eliminate it, but that also means if you want to talk through it, you have to turn up the volume again beforehand.
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If you can find a deal on the camera and a few months of the Cat Nanny subscription, which the brand occasionally offers, you'll save some money and try out real-time alerts and video history. Though, sometimes the notifications were excessive—seeing “Your cat misses you!” pop up on my screen when I'm already sad to be gone was genuinely heartbreaking. —Medea Giordano
Best Budget Pet Camera
Photograph: Wyze
Wyze Cam Pan V3$40 at Amazon$40 at Best Buy$34 at Wyze
While not designed as a pet cam, the Wyze Cam Pan V3 has several features that make it perfect for keeping tabs on your furry friends. Cats and dogs don’t always step obligingly into the frame, so a panning camera can help you get a better look at them. The Wyze Cam Pan V3 can spin 360 degrees and tilt up and down 180 degrees. Pick the right spot for it, and you can find your pets wherever they are in a room.
As a budget camera, the Cam Pan V3 is one white plastic cube above another with a hinge between them. It’s lightweight, but a rubber base keeps it grounded, and you can always use a mount to fix it up if you’re worried about your pet knocking it over. There’s two-way audio, so you can hear meows or barks and speak soothing words. The video quality is decent (1080p), though the picture looks blown out when it’s super bright. There is color night vision, but the frame rate is low, so action videos can look choppy.
The Wyze Cam Pan V3 doesn’t dispense treats, but if you subscribe to Cam Plus ($2 per month), you can get smart detections, so your camera will alert you via the app when it sees your pets or even when it hears meowing or barking (audio detection is in beta and doesn't work flawlessly). Set your camera to pan through various points marked in the app every few seconds to boost your chances of catching what your pets are doing. The Wyze app includes a Rules section that enables Cam Plus subscribers to create automation, so you can set a schedule for the camera to be on when you’re away at work or have a pet detection trigger another camera, light, or notification.
If you’re wary of the Wyze brand after Bitdefender disclosed vulnerabilities last year that took far too long to fix, we don’t blame you. Wyze claims it has significantly improved its security infrastructure. We also appreciate the privacy mode, which prompts the Cam Pan V3 to face directly down so it can’t see anything; we recommend turning this mode on (or just unplugging the camera) when you are home. —Simon Hill
An Affordable 360 Cam With Some Caveats
Photograph: Petcube
Petcube Cam 360$84 at Amazon (2 Pack)
Petcube makes a few solid cameras. This is the brand's newest and it has a great design feature—its base rotates 360 degrees around and the lens is a separate piece that moves autonomously so you can look up and down too. You can't do that with the Eufy and Furbo cameras above. There's a privacy mode here too, which we appreciate, that rotates the lens all the way down so it's completely covered by the rest of the camera body.
We also like Petcube's Play 2 Camera, which is similarly compact and has a laser aimed at cat owners. Within the app, you can drag your finger around on the camera's live feed, and the built-in laser will follow the path. The laser is pet-safe, and the camera itself has Alexa built-in, meaning if you tell Amazon's voice assistant to play with your pet, it will initiate a play session. That feature works whether you're at home and feeling lazy, or you're away and don't have time to drag the laser around yourself.
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Petcube's biggest flaw is its app, which needs serious work. We experienced lagginess, in both using the aforementioned laser—sometimes it skipped around or responded slowly—and just simply clicking through to a live feed. Often, we had to click several times to get the direction arrows to activate and for privacy mode to turn on. Hopefully the brand gives it an overhaul, but if you can deal with that for the sake of affordability, the 360 cam has its pros.
We also tried the Petcube Care subscription. If you don't need a bigger backlog of stored videos, a constant stream of lackluster discounts from Petcube's partners, or smart alerts, we didn't really find it all that useful. But if you have multiple pets or you're away from home a lot, you may find the subscription worthwhile—especially since it does offer a web interface, unlike the Eufy and Furbo cams. —Medea Giordano and Louryn Strampe
Another Camera We Like
Photograph: Petcube
Petcube Bites 2$169 at Amazon$199 at Walmart
Qualms with Petcube's app aside, the Bites 2 is a another treat-tossing camera we liked. It's a good-looking, rectangular box with an aluminum base and a black plastic treat bin. Unlike the others on this list, it comes with a mounting kit so you can attach it securely to the wall. It doesn’t take up counter space in your kitchen, you don’t have to devote a shrine to your dog in the corner of your living room, and your dog can’t knock it over if they become overly enthused.
The Furbo is more attractive and has more dog-specific features, but the Bites 2 integrated itself more seamlessly into our lives. For example, it can accommodate a staggering 1.5 pounds of treats at once—more than enough for my dog to have her meals entirely by pet cam—and in a much wider variety. The Bites 2 can accommodate kibble that is up to 1 inch in diameter, and it comes with inserts that let you control how many are thrown at once.
My dog isn’t too vocal (perhaps my working from home has something to do with that), but the Bites 2 also has a surprisingly extensive four-microphone array and speaker, which means it sounds much better and clearer than the original Furbo I tried, on both ends. My dog already had some experience with the original Furbo by the time I tried the Bites 2 with her, but she could hear the Bites 2’s chime even from the backyard. When my children and I sat outside their preschool, I could see her run in the dog door to gobble up treats when we threw them at her.
The Bites 2 also has many of the same software features as the other cameras on this list. You can also control it with Alexa (which is built in, not enabled). Even after my Premium subscription ran out, I still found the Bites 2's livestreaming and treat-tossing to be adequate to check on my dog for a short weekend away. —Adrienne So
An Honorable Mention
Photograph: Amazon
Catit Pixi Smart Mouse Camera$90 at Catit$106 $101 at Amazon
We love a lot of Catit's lineup, including its Pixi smart fountain and feeder. This 1080p camera is another in that line of pet tech, and it's adorably mouse-shaped. The stand (the oversize mouse feet) hinges up and down and rotates for a better angle, and it's magnetic so you can stick it to its mounting plate. But it's expensive for what it is, given that the lens doesn't rotate and you'll have to use a microSD to get video footage beyond a live feed. If the Pixi were around $50, it'd be a great buy for small spaces or to use in addition to a 360 camera.
