When shopping for our home network and security, I chose Ubiquiti due to its prosumer approach and the integrated management for various applications. However, I was deterred by the high cost of their cameras, especially the PTZ models available at the time (around a year ago). Their sole PTZ model was priced at about $2,000, which was far too much, as I needed five cameras for adequate coverage. Even one was out of the question. As a result, I opted for Reolink and purchased five RLC-823A 8MP PoE PTZ cameras along with a 4K 16 Channel PoE NVR for half the cost of one Ubiquiti PTZ camera. I have since been happy with my setup.

Nonetheless, I held out hope for the future. I wished I could use the Ubiquiti Protect application with my cameras. Reolink’s user interface is quite impressive and a significant upgrade from the previous cheaper solutions I had used. However, Ubiquiti Protect offers better features and the integrated appeal that attracted me to Ubiquiti in the first place. It’s also worth noting that neither solution requires a subscription and monthly fee, as both are free once you have paid for the devices and associated software.

Ubiquiti has since released a more affordable PTZ camera and opened up its ecosystem to third-party cameras. Kudos to them for this move! As long as your camera is ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) compatible, you should be able to integrate it into Protect (this feature must be enabled manually in the Network control plane of Protect {in Protect /settings/system/ and enable Discover Third-Party Cameras}). There was another limitation with Reolink; they don’t have an application for Apple TVs, which is unfortunate because they do have an excellent app for iPhones. The good news is that Apple TV has a UniFi Protect application.

At this point, I really wanted to add the Reolink cameras to Ubiquiti’s Protect. Unfortunately, after searching for a how-to guide, I found nothing helpful. It wasn’t just a case of Google losing its edge in search; there was a real lack of resources. After spending several months on this and receiving excellent support from the Reolink team—thank you so much for your outstanding customer support—I can now share the process that worked for me at the end of the day.

In the remainder of the post, I assume you have the basic Reolink setup, meaning you have connected your cameras directly to the NVR and let it configure them. This post does not cover the alternative method—adding your cameras to your existing network and then to the NVR. In my configuration, the Reolink devices were on their network, invisible to the UniFi Network application, which presented an issue for this exercise. You could move your cameras to a switch in your Ubiquiti network, but that would require PoE ports, or you would need to inject power into the cameras, which seems unnecessary since the Reolink NVRs already provide PoE. In my case, all the 48 ports of my USW-Enterprise-48-PoE (720W) are taken.

Fortunately, Reolink added a feature called HyBridge (in the NVR /network/advanced/ and enable HyBridge mode), which I discovered after installing the latest firmware. By enabling this feature, the embedded router in the NVR is disabled, allowing all devices connected to the NVR to be visible from your router—in our case, the UniFi Network application. Sure enough, they appeared on the clients list immediately.

After completing this first step, the next task is to enable ONVIF on the Reolink cameras. The NVR also supports ONVIF, and if you enable the settings (in the NVR networking/services), including RTSP and ONVIF, the NVR will also appear in Protect. The limitation is that only the stream from the last camera attached to the NVR is visible.

Next, you need to enable ONVIF on each camera. To do this, first create a password (in the NVR, for each camera /camera/general/set password). Once the password is set, you can access the camera using your browser to enable RTSP/ONVIF (/device settings/network/server settings, and activate both). After completing this last step, the cameras will appear in UniFi Protect, and you can adopt them. Et voila!

Of course, even though Ubiquiti has opened its ecosystem to third-party cameras, some features still need support. Fair enough, after all, their goal is to lower the entry barrier to the UniFi ecosystem, not to create business for competition 😉. However, note that PTZ is currently supported in Protect via ONVIF! I hope this tutorial helps others looking to make this transition. It’s essential to note finally that this migration/integration doesn’t exclude existing operations and features in the Reolink ecosystem; they continue to function as usual.

As I mentioned earlier, I am particularly interested in incorporating Ubiquiti’s advanced AI features into my Reolink cameras. Ubiquiti recently launched the AI Port, which seems to be the perfect solution for this purpose. Assuming I can purchase one, I will try it next. Stay tuned!

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