Develop

Your cameras and your smart home, on your own hardware.

CamStack watches your cameras, records what matters, recognises people, cars, animals and parcels, and lets you know — without sending your video anywhere. It runs on a home server, a NAS or a spare computer, and it is free and open source.

0.1 is a beta. Guides and install steps: camstack-docs.zentik.app

What you get

• Live view that just works. All your cameras in a fast grid — on your phone, in the browser or in the desktop app. Talk back through cameras that have a speaker.
• Recordings you can search. Record all the time or only when something happens. A timeline shows you when there was activity, and the event library lets you jump straight to the person, the car or the parcel.
• Smart detection, at home. People, vehicles, animals, parcels, faces, number plates and sounds such as a smoke alarm — analysed on your own machine, using whatever it has: a regular CPU, Intel, AMD, Apple or NVIDIA graphics, or a Coral stick.
• Alerts worth opening. Decide which camera, which area and which hours matter. Each alert comes with a picture, and optionally a one-line description written by an AI model of your choice.
• Part of your smart home. Your lights, sensors, locks, robot vacuums and climate units sit next to your cameras, and everything can be shared with Home Assistant, Apple Home, Alexa or Google Home.
• Grows with your house. Add more computers as you add cameras. CamStack spreads the work across them and moves it when one is busy.
• Make it yours. Adjust how any device reports its state, combine sensors into new devices, write automations, and train the detector on your own scenes.

A look around

Live view with the activity timeline	Events, filtered by what was seen
Recordings and playback	Several machines, balanced automatically
Cameras and home devices together	The mobile app

Works with

Each integration is a plugin you add from the admin page. Missing one? Plugins are ordinary npm packages — see how to write one and the examples.

Private by design

Everything — video, recordings, detections, faces — stays on your machines. There is no CamStack account.

Two small hosted pieces exist because the other side requires them: the Alexa skill talks to a small cloud function — ours by default, or your own if you prefer to deploy it — and the page at camstack.zentik.app that lets the mobile app find your server from a link. It never sees your video.

Updates, plugins and detection models are downloaded from public sources (npm, GitHub and Hugging Face). Anything else that leaves your house is an integration you turned on yourself.

Get started

Then open https://<your-server>:4443, sign in as admin / changeme, and pick a new password.

Community

Questions and ideas: Discussions · Bugs: Issues · Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md · Security: SECURITY.md

CamStack is released under the MIT licence.