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ToolBlake Blackshear/10 trustVerified
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Frigate

Local NVR with realtime AI object detection for your IP cameras.

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About

Frigate is a complete, local network video recorder designed for Home Assistant, with AI object detection running on your own hardware. It uses OpenCV and TensorFlow to detect people, cars, pets and more in realtime from IP camera feeds — no cloud subscription, no footage leaving your network.

It's built for efficiency: low-overhead motion detection decides when and where to run object detection, detection runs in separate processes, and it talks MQTT for easy integration. A GPU or AI accelerator (like a Coral TPU) is strongly recommended — they outperform even the best CPUs at detection.

What it can do

  • Realtime object detection on camera feeds
  • Local recording with event-based retention
  • Home Assistant integration
  • MQTT events for automations
  • Birdseye multi-camera view

Setup

  1. Install Docker on your server.
  2. Write a frigate.yml config with your cameras and detector (e.g. Coral, OpenVINO, TensorRT).
  3. Start Frigate with Docker Compose.
  4. Open the web UI to view live feeds, events and recordings.
  5. Optionally connect MQTT and the Home Assistant integration for automations.

Prerequisites

Docker; IP cameras (RTSP); a GPU or AI accelerator (Coral TPU, Hailo) recommended; MQTT broker optional.

Use cases

automationothers

Works with

Trust score — 8/10

/10 trustVerified

Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 36.5k stars — homelab NVR standard; pushed 2026-10-12 — active. Manual review: realtime local object detection with sensible resource design; Coral/GPU strongly recommended, CPU-only is a poor experience. License: MIT.

★ 36,541 GitHub stars

How the trust score is built

Full methodology →
Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
7.0/10
Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
9.0/10
Openness · license + docs
9.0/10
Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
8.0/10
  • · 36.5k stars — homelab NVR standard
  • · pushed 2026-10-12 — active
  • · manual review: realtime local object detection with sensible resource design; Coral/GPU strongly recommended, CPU-only is a poor experience

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.