Fregata vs Scrypted, Blue Iris, Synology Surveillance Station

If you’re shopping for an NVR that runs on a Mac, the realistic short list is Fregata, Scrypted, Blue Iris (via a separate Windows PC; no longer a viable VM/Boot Camp option on Apple Silicon), and Synology Surveillance Station (on a Synology NAS, with a Mac as the client). This page is the side-by-side comparison.

Every claim here is anchored to a primary source where one is publicly available. Where vendors don’t publish a number (some pricing is behind a sign-in portal; some is on reseller pages only) the page calls that out so you can verify before deciding.

For the Frigate-vs-Fregata side of the question (Fregata is built on Frigate), see Fregata vs Frigate. This page is about everything else.

TL;DR — pick this if…

Fregata — you have an Apple Silicon Mac, you want a native macOS app with the Apple Neural Engine doing object detection, you want a one-time payment with no per-camera fees, you want your cameras in the Apple Home app (HomeKit Secure Video included), and you’re comfortable plugging into the Frigate ecosystem (MQTT, Home Assistant integration, Frigate+ custom models).
Scrypted — you want one hub for many camera brands, cloud cameras included, on Linux, Windows or a Mac, and you’re willing to pay a per-camera annual subscription (Scrypted NVR) to actually record video locally.
Blue Iris — you have an existing Windows PC, you don’t need Mac-native software, and you accept the post-12-month maintenance-renewal model (or rolling back to your last paid version when an update would otherwise watermark every feed).
Synology Surveillance Station — you already own a Synology NAS, you have eight or fewer cameras (license-cost inflection point), and the deep-learning analytics you want fit Synology’s DVA-appliance lineup.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those one-liners.

Fregata vs Scrypted

Scrypted is a video integration and routing platform. Its core platform is open source — though, importantly, with a per-module licensing model: the top of the LICENSE file declares that “licensing… will vary throughout the repository,” so there’s no single SPDX license that covers the whole project.

The piece most reviews leave out: the recording engine is a separate paid product wither per-camera annual license fees.

The Scrypted NVR plugin is closed-source and paid

The component that actually records video, runs smart detections, and powers the mobile and desktop apps is Scrypted NVR — a closed-source, paid subscription. The fulfillment policy confirms an annual subscription that renews automatically and is non-refundable.

Pricing is published at the top of billing.scrypted.app: the base annual subscription is $40/year and includes 4 camera licenses. Additional licenses are $10/year each.

For an 8-camera household, that’s $40 base + 4 additional licenses × $10 = $80/year, in perpetuity. For context, Fregata covers any number of cameras for $10 once, with 12 months of updates included.

You can run Scrypted’s core without the NVR plugin, but local recording won’t work. The usual workaround is HomeKit Secure Video: Scrypted bridges your camera to HKSV, and HKSV records to iCloud (an Apple subscription, not Scrypted’s). That isn’t local recording. Fregata does both in one app for its one-time $10: local recording on your Mac, and HomeKit Secure Video when you want it.

HomeKit and HomeKit Secure Video, head to head

Both show each camera in the Apple Home app as an accessory of its own, with live view, motion notifications and HomeKit Secure Video, in Apple’s original form and in the newer one that came with iOS 27. Fregata matches Scrypted on all of that, and goes further where it matters day to day: a stream that needs converting, watching away from home, what counts as motion, and local recording.

	Fregata	Scrypted
Apple Home live view and HomeKit Secure Video	Built in	Free HomeKit plugin
The newer HomeKit Secure Video (iOS 27)	Used for an H.265 camera once you confirm every home hub runs version 27: live view and clips of the camera’s own H.265	Supported, and recommended only for cameras that can’t send H.264
A stream the Home app can’t play as it is (H.265, or several slices per picture)	Converted on the Media Engine automatically, leaving the CPU free	Its docs advise H.264 cameras: transcoding H.265 lowers picture quality and raises CPU load
Watching away from home	Copies sized for the iPhone’s connection, picked automatically	Pick a lower-bitrate substream, or turn on transcoding for remote streams
What the Home app counts as motion	Frigate’s object detection on the Neural Engine (alerts by default, narrowed by object and zone), or any motion	The camera’s own motion sensor over ONVIF, or a motion detection plugin (camera setup)
Local recording beside it	Included in the one-time $10	Scrypted NVR, a per-camera annual subscription

Fregata also adds an optional bridge of occupancy sensors (one per object, zone or sound Frigate detects) and switches for detection, recording, snapshots and the camera, for Home app automations. See Apple Home for the details.

Where Scrypted is genuinely strong

Plugin ecosystem for camera authentication and discovery. Scrypted has first-party plugins for Ring, Google Nest, UniFi Protect, and other vendor ecosystems that handle the authentication / device-discovery / two-way-audio glue end-to-end. Fregata also reaches most of these vendors — Ring, Nest, Wyze, Tapo, Tuya, HomeKit cameras, UniFi Protect, and so on — via the bundled go2rtc, but the configuration is closer to raw protocol setup than a polished UI flow. If you want a “click to add my Ring doorbell” UX, Scrypted is faster; if you’re comfortable pasting credentials into go2rtc.yml, both work.
Multi-platform. Runs natively on macOS (via Homebrew or the desktop app), Linux (Docker), and Windows.
CoreML detection on Apple Silicon. Scrypted’s CoreML plugin uses the Apple Neural Engine on Mac — same hardware path Fregata uses. The difference is depth: Fregata ships a custom Rust-based CoreML detector with explicit ANE-vs-GPU backend selection as a config knob (see Detection tuning), supports Frigate+ custom trained models, defaults tuned per chip, and the warmup-tier diagnostic in the menu-bar tray. Scrypted’s plugin is a more general-purpose model loader.

Where Fregata wins for a Mac user

Recording is included in the price. Fregata is a one-time $10 that buys 12 months of updates and unlimited cameras. Scrypted’s core is free, but to actually record locally (the whole point of a NVR) it has a per-camera annual subscription — see the math above.
Built on Frigate’s mature NVR engine. Frigate has been the reference open-source NVR for 5+ years and has a deep community library of camera configs, MQTT integrations, Home Assistant guides, and Frigate+ custom-model workflows. Fregata inherits all of it. Scrypted NVR is a younger, bespoke engine.
No detection sub-streams required. Fregata runs detection on the full-resolution camera stream because the ANE is fast enough. Scrypted (and most NVRs) need a separate low-resolution sub-stream to keep detection affordable.
Frigate+ custom-trained models work natively. If you subscribe to Frigate+, your custom model loads in Fregata via the same plus://... identifier you’d use on Linux Frigate.
Apple Home built into the NVR. Fregata shows its cameras in the Apple Home app itself, with HomeKit Secure Video (including Apple’s newer HomeKit Secure Video in iOS 27), motion from Frigate’s own detection, conversions on the Media Engine, and copies sized for a phone’s connection away from home. A Frigate setup no longer needs a separate bridge in front of it for that. See HomeKit and HomeKit Secure Video, head to head.

Where Scrypted wins

A server that isn’t a Mac. Scrypted runs on Linux and Windows as well as macOS. Fregata needs an Apple Silicon Mac.
Polished UX for vendor-cloud cameras. Both platforms can ingest Ring, Nest, Wyze, Tapo, Tuya, and similar cloud-API cameras — Fregata via the bundled go2rtc, Scrypted via its per-vendor plugins. Scrypted’s plugins are typically a click-through UI; Fregata’s path is editing go2rtc.yml. The one notable gap on Fregata’s side is Eufy battery models in cloud-only mode, which still need a third-party bridge (EufyP2PStream) in front of go2rtc.

Fregata vs Blue Iris

Blue Iris is a Windows NVR from a single developer — Ken Pletzer / Perspective Software LLC. It has been the de-facto Windows NVR for ~15 years.

Pricing in 2025-2026

Two perpetual personal-use editions, listed on the Blue Iris purchase page:

LE License — $39.95, 1 camera only.
Full License — $99.95, up to 128 cameras.

The first 12 months of updates are included with either license. After that, continued access to new updates requires the Blue Iris Extended Support & Maintenance plan, with three tiers:

Basic — $44.95/year auto-renewing or $49.95 for a single, non-auto-renewing year. Covers version updates and major-upgrade protection, plus email support.
Priority — $199.95/year auto-renewing or $249.95/single year. Adds prioritized email support, phone support (by appointment), and remote-desktop support.
Commercial License — $39.95/month, the only tier that permits commercial use.

You can keep using your last-covered version forever — but if you install any update released after your maintenance lapses, the software flips into evaluation mode and stamps an “Blue Iris Evaluation Version” watermark on every camera feed until you renew or roll back.

A 15-day free, fully functional (but with a watermark on all video) evaluation is available before purchase.

Where Blue Iris is genuinely strong

Mature feature set. Years of accumulated knobs — sub-stream switching, motion zones, hot-spot detection, perimeter intelligence, time-lapse generation, DDNS.
First-party MQTT publishing. Built into the Digital IO & IoT tab. The community Home Assistant integration (currently maintained by kramttocs, last release Nov 2025) exposes per-camera entities, binary sensors, and arming switches.
Desktop-style Windows UI. Multi-monitor, drag-and-drop layout, conventions Windows users already know.

Where Fregata wins for a Mac user

It runs on macOS. Blue Iris is Windows-only. There’s no native Mac build, no Boot Camp on Apple Silicon, and the developer/community discourage running it in Parallels or VMware Fusion (requires performance-killing x86_64-to-arm64 emulation and hardware acceleration is unavailable inside a VM). The only Mac story is the web UI / iOS app as a remote client pointed at a Windows host. If “Mac-native” matters at all, Blue Iris is the wrong answer.
Apple-Silicon-accelerated detection without a separate GPU box. Blue Iris has no built-in object detection — it relies on CodeProject.AI Server (an officially-recommended add-on) or the older DeepStack. Both run on Windows or Linux, not on macOS, and an NVIDIA GPU is strongly recommended for usable latency. A Mac mini running Fregata replaces that whole tower-PC-plus-GPU stack.
One-time pricing actually means one-time. Fregata’s $10 buys 12 months of updates; if you don’t renew, you keep running the latest version you had access to with no watermark, no nag screen, no functional changes. Blue Iris watermarks every camera feed if you skip the $44.95/year maintenance renewal and then install a newer build.
Built on Frigate — open-source NVR core with a deep ecosystem. Blue Iris is closed source, single-developer.
Email support is included, no maintenance contract. Fregata is a paid commercial product from a single vendor (3rd Bit Labs) with email support included for every paid customer — reply to your license email and you get a human. Blue Iris’s email support is gated on an active maintenance plan ($44.95/year for Basic, $199.95/year for Priority); if your maintenance lapses, so does access to email support.

Where Blue Iris wins

You’re already a Windows shop. If your home server is a Windows PC and you’re not changing platforms, Blue Iris on the existing hardware is a coherent answer.
Decades of Win32-desktop polish. The UI is shaped for Windows users who prefer a native-feeling app to a web UI.

Fregata vs Synology Surveillance Station

Synology Surveillance Station ships free with every Synology NAS — but the licensing model on top of “free” is where the actual cost lives.

License costs and bundled counts

Per Synology’s Device License Pack page:

Hardware	Free camera licenses
Standard DiskStation / RackStation NAS	2
DVA1622 (compact NVR appliance)	4
DVA3221 (4-bay deep-learning NVR)	8

Additional licenses are sold as Camera License Packs (CLP1, CLP4, CLP8 — 1, 4, or 8 licenses respectively). Synology doesn’t publish MSRP; reseller listings put street pricing around $50–60 USD per camera with mild bulk discounting (e.g. CLP1 on Amazon). Licenses are perpetual once activated.

For an 8-camera household on a standard NAS that’s: 2 free + 6 purchased ≈ $300–360 in license costs, in addition to the NAS itself. The price floor stays high because the NAS is typically a 2-bay+ device starting in the $300s.

Deep Video Analytics (DVA) is hardware-bound

Synology’s deep-learning analytics — people/vehicle detection, license plate recognition, face recognition, intrusion zones — is DVA. Two important properties:

DVA is not a separate license. It comes with the DVA appliances themselves.
DVA only runs on DVA-branded hardware — currently the DVA1622 (Intel Celeron J4125 + iGPU, capped at ~2 concurrent analytics tasks) and the DVA3221 (4-bay with NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti, up to 12 tasks below 4K). Standard DiskStations cannot run DVA regardless of licenses purchased.

Recent reputation (worth knowing)

Two issues from 2025-2026 that come up in recent reviews:

May 2026 licensing walkback. Synology’s new BC510 / TC510 / BC800Z cameras now require a paid Surveillance Station license, reversing the precedent set by the BC500 / TC500 / CC400W generation (which were license-free). Widely criticized as a walk-back.
2025 HDD lock-in. Synology’s third-party HDD restriction was partially reversed for Plus-class NAS in DSM 7.3 (October 2025), but still applies to rackmount and DVA / NVR appliance units — including the surveillance appliances.

HomeKit and Home Assistant

No first-party HomeKit Secure Video support and no official Home Assistant integration. Both are community- driven, and the community path most people land on is bridging Surveillance Station cameras through Scrypted back to HomeKit Secure Video or Home Assistant — at which point you may be paying Scrypted’s per-camera subscription on top of Synology’s per-camera license. A Mac running Fregata can record the same cameras itself and show them in the Apple Home app with HomeKit Secure Video, with no bridge.

Where Fregata wins for a Mac user

Per-camera cost is zero. Fregata’s $10 covers every camera you connect — 2 or 32, same price. Synology adds ~$50–60 per camera beyond the bundled count.
Apple Silicon detection vs. an iGPU or GTX 1050 Ti. The DVA appliances are competent at their fixed task lists, but a Mac mini’s Neural Engine is faster per inference than the DVA1622’s iGPU and the DVA3221’s older GTX 1050 Ti — at a fraction of the power draw and without locking you to a specific NAS line.
Open Frigate ecosystem. Native MQTT, native Home Assistant integration (HACS Frigate plugin works without modification), Frigate+ custom model support. Synology Surveillance Station is its own walled garden.
Not coupled to a NAS brand. Replace the Mac, point Fregata at the same recordings folder, you’re back up. Replace a failing Synology NAS and you re-buy hardware that meets DVA’s specific requirements or lose the DVA features.

Where Synology wins

You already own a Synology NAS. The capital cost is sunk and the first 2 (or 4, or 8) cameras are free.
Tightest hardware integration with NAS storage. Recordings land on the same RAID/BTRFS volume as your other files; snapshots and offsite replication use the same DSM tooling.
Published camera-compatibility database. Synology’s searchable Surveillance Station compatibility list catalogues per-model feature support (PTZ, two-way audio, IO triggers, event handling) for the cameras they’ve tested. Fregata reaches the same RTSP/ONVIF universe — and via the bundled go2rtc, several cloud-API vendors Synology doesn’t support — but doesn’t maintain its own per-model feature database. If you want to look up “does my obscure ONVIF camera support backchannel audio?” before you buy, Synology’s list is genuinely useful as a reference (even if you end up running Fregata).

At-a-glance comparison

	Fregata	Scrypted	Blue Iris	Synology SS
OS	macOS (Apple Silicon)	macOS / Linux / Win	Windows	Synology DSM
License model	$10 one-time + 12 mo. updates	Free core + $40/yr NVR plugin subscription (4 cameras included, $10/yr for each additional camera)	$39.95–99.95 + $44.95/yr maintenance for updates	NAS hardware + ~$50–60/camera (after 2–8 free)
Object detection on Apple Silicon ANE	Yes (built-in)	Yes (via CoreML plugin)	No (no macOS support)	No
VideoToolbox hardware decode/encode	Yes (default)	Partial	n/a	n/a
No detection sub-stream required	Yes	No	No	No
Apple Home (HomeKit)	Yes (built in): live view at home and away, motion from Frigate’s detection, sensors and switches	Yes	No	No (community via Scrypted)
HomeKit Secure Video (iCloud recording)	Yes (built in), including iOS 27’s newer kind	Yes	No	No (community via Scrypted)
Home Assistant integration	Yes (native Frigate HACS)	Yes (plugin)	Yes (community MQTT integration)	No first-party (community via Scrypted)
Local-first recordings	Yes	Yes (with paid plugin subscription)	Yes	Yes
Open-source core	Yes (built on Frigate)	Yes (mixed per-module licensing)	No	No
Per-camera license cost	$0	$10/yr per additional camera beyond the 4 included in the base subscription	$0 within 128-camera cap	~$50–60 per camera over 2 free

When Fregata is the right answer

Stack the points above and Fregata’s specific niche is:

You have, or want to buy, an Apple Silicon Mac.
You want recording included in the price, not as a separate per-camera annual subscription.
You want a single one-time $10 with no maintenance-renewal watermark mechanic.
You want to plug into the Frigate ecosystem (MQTT, Home Assistant integration, Frigate+ custom models, 5+ years of community camera configs) instead of a vendor walled garden.
You want your cameras in the Apple Home app, with HomeKit Secure Video, without running a separate bridge.

Mac users for whom none of those five apply are usually a better fit for one of the other tools listed here — and that’s a fine outcome. Fregata is deliberately narrow.

For the full Fregata-vs-Frigate breakdown — what we add, what we remove, what stays identical to upstream — read Fregata vs Frigate.