UGREEN says the HomeAgent HA100 can run its storage, camera recording, smart home control and voice assistant locally, without the cloud. That claim is the whole reason this box exists. So I tested it the direct way: I blocked it from the internet and kept using it.
TL;DR: It passed. With the HA100 and both UGREEN cameras cut off from the internet at my firewall, recording, AI detection, event search, the Uliya voice assistant, smart home control, NAS file access and the Wi-Fi camera all kept working. My third-party cameras did too. Push notifications to my phone didn’t, and that’s expected. The bigger caveats are the 8-feed and 12-task limits, and the fact that this is beta hardware sold as a crowdfunding pre-order.
This post is sponsored by UGREEN. They supplied the HA100, both cameras and the hard drives, and they reviewed the video script and a draft before it went live. The test design, results and conclusions are mine. More on how I work with brands: thissmart.house/transparency.
These are beta units on beta firmware, and UGREEN told me to expect issues. Features and limits may change before shipping.
How the firewall test works
I wasn’t going to take my whole house offline. My family would kill me. Instead, I built a firewall rule around the HomeAgent and its two cameras. They can talk to anything inside my network, but every connection they try to make out to the internet gets dropped. Everything else in the house stays online like normal.
So when I say “offline” in this post, that’s what I mean: the HA100, the SynCare ID500 Pro and the SynCare OD600 Pro blocked at my gateway, with the rest of the network up.
Then I set five things the box had to do before I’d call it local, plus a bonus test UGREEN doesn’t control.
The five tests
Test 1: Does it keep recording?
This is a low bar for a security system, but it matters. A lot of consumer cameras lean on some part of the vendor’s cloud, and an internet outage or a server problem shouldn’t also turn into a gap in your footage. To pass, recordings had to be created after the block and land on the surveillance drive inside the box.
They did. The HA100 had been blocked for a couple of days by the time I checked, and the footage from that whole stretch was on the drive. The night you actually need footage is probably the night your internet was out. That’s just how it goes.
Test 2: Does the AI still understand the cameras?
Recording locally isn’t hard. The harder question is whether the AI that makes sense of the video also runs locally. The HA100 can tag events as people, pets, vehicles and packages, and it can put a name to faces you’ve identified in the app. On the indoor camera, it can also listen for things like a baby crying.
With the internet still blocked, I asked Uliya what time the school bus came by the front door. It came back with 7:56 a.m. and the camera that caught it. Scrolling back through the event list, it was still tagging cars driving by and people walking up.
Then there’s what UGREEN calls AI Keyword Search, and I wanted to know how literal “keyword” is. The simple version writes a description of each event and matches the exact word you type. The more useful version would understand what you mean even when you don’t use the same words.
I searched for “backpack” and got every event where the AI’s description included a backpack, including one of my kids heading out for the day. That search runs against the descriptions the HA100 generates, and it’s limited to two cameras right now. For everything else, the event filters (person, vehicle, package, and which camera) narrow things down quickly.
The useful part: the camera doesn’t need its own AI. Detection comes from the HA100, so an older camera on the side of your house gets the same tagging.
Test 3: Talking to Uliya
This is where it stops being a NAS with camera software installed. UGREEN’s assistant is called Uliya, and you talk to it right at the front of the HA100, which has a small touchscreen for feedback. Right now it supports English, German and Mandarin.
Voice assistants are usually the first thing to quit when the cloud goes away. When my internet drops, my Google Homes get very upset. Uliya kept answering questions about the cameras and kept controlling devices with the internet blocked. It can also play music you keep in UGREEN’s music app, and you can type to it in the app instead of talking.
For smart home control, UGREEN has Custom Modes, which group several actions under one name, like a scene. I set up a work mode that turns on all the office lights and an office-off mode that turns everything off, monitors included. Both ran by voice with the box offline. It’s basic, but it works 100% locally.
Test 4: NAS file access
The least exciting test. Are my files still there? Yes. Can I reach them over the network? Yes. I’d have been alarmed if this one failed.
Test 5: The Wi-Fi camera
This is the one I was less sure about. The OD600 Pro is wired into one of the HA100’s PoE ports, so its video has nowhere else to go. The ID500 Pro is different. It sits on my regular Wi-Fi with its own network connection. The question was whether it sends video straight across the LAN to the HA100, or whether part of that path depends on UGREEN’s cloud, even with the camera about 8 feet (2.4 m) from the box.
It went straight across the LAN. Both cameras stayed live. That’s the architecture I want from anything making local-first claims.
Bonus: third-party cameras
Everything so far was UGREEN hardware talking to UGREEN hardware. The HA100 also supports third-party cameras over ONVIF and RTSP, so I connected my Reolink NVR over ONVIF and a couple of Aqara cameras over RTSP. With the HA100 still blocked, both sets kept streaming and recording, and they got the same person, pet, package and vehicle detection. Audio detection, like the crying-baby alert, only works on UGREEN’s own cameras.
How well this works for you depends on your hardware. I try to buy cameras that support local protocols for exactly this reason. If yours do, they’ll work here.
What still needs the internet
Push notifications to my phone stopped. Events still showed up inside the UGREEN app, but nothing reached my phone until I restored internet access, and then the notifications came through within a few minutes. I’m not counting that against local processing. Phone notifications have to pass through a cloud service to reach your phone, so that’s a requirement on the phone side.
The same goes for smart alerts, which send an AI summary of what happened on up to two cameras. You also need internet to update the box and install apps. That’s how I remembered it was blocked at all. I went to update an app and it told me it was offline.
Inside the HA100
Underneath the AI branding, it’s an unusual NAS. There are two standard drive bays for normal storage, plus a separate bay just for surveillance footage. Cameras write almost nonstop, so keeping that workload off the drives holding your files makes sense and saves wear on them.
There’s also an M.2 slot, but UGREEN reserves it for AI models, not cache or storage. That’s a future feature.
One setup quirk: you need at least two drives installed before you can initialize it, one on the storage side and one on the surveillance side. Even if you’re buying this mostly for cameras, budget for the NAS drives too.
UGREEN rates the HA100 at 26 TOPS of AI compute. Six of those come from the onboard processor and 20 from a dedicated accelerator card. That’s the hardware doing object recognition, search, voice processing and the local language model, instead of handing it off to a cloud server. There’s also an option to connect a cloud AI API to extend it. I haven’t tested that yet.
The rest of the hardware: 16 GB of LPDDR5, a 64 GB eMMC system drive, and a 2.5 GbE port back to your network. Around the back are four PoE ports with a 65 W total budget. Each port is 10/100, which sounds slow in 2026, but it’s plenty for a single camera stream. The 2.5 GbE uplink handles everything between the HA100 and the rest of your network, so file transfers stay fast if your network supports it.
Compared with the DXP4800 Plus I looked at last year, this isn’t a NAS with a camera app added on. UGREEN designed the storage, networking and AI hardware around one box being your NAS, NVR and smart home controller.
The SynCare cameras
UGREEN is building its own camera line around the HomeAgent, and I tested the first two.
The ID500 Pro is the indoor model: a 4K, 8 MP pan-and-tilt camera with a 4 mm f/1.6 lens, dual-band Wi-Fi 6, 8x digital zoom and a physical privacy shutter. UGREEN’s current spec sheet also lists starlight color night vision.
The OD600 Pro is the more interesting hardware. It’s IP66 rated with three sensors: a fixed 4K 8 MP camera on top, and a pan-and-tilt assembly underneath with two 5 MP cameras at different focal lengths. That gives the lower section up to 9x hybrid zoom while the top camera keeps watching the wide scene. It has motion-activated spotlights, and you can power it from a 12 V supply or over PoE. PoE is simpler.
The 8-feed and 12-task limits
These are the two limits to know before anything else.
First, the HA100 tops out at eight camera feeds, and third-party cameras count toward that. UGREEN says “feeds,” not cameras, for a reason. The OD600 Pro’s wide view and PTZ view show up separately, so one outdoor camera uses two of the eight.
Second, there’s a local AI budget of 12 detection tasks, and that’s easier to hit than it sounds. Each detection type counts separately on each camera. Person detection on one camera is one task. Pet detection on that same camera is a second. Turn on person, pet and package detection on four cameras and you’ve used all 12.
I ran close to the 8-feed limit for most of my testing and didn’t notice slowdowns or instability, so the caps may be there for a reason. But they matter if you’re replacing a bigger NVR. I’ve asked UGREEN whether they’re hardware limits or something a software update could raise.
What works today vs. the roadmap
These are beta units, and UGREEN asked me to look for problems, so I want to keep two lists separate.
Tested and working on my unit: local recording, AI processing, keyword search, the voice assistant, Custom Modes, Matter control, NAS access and third-party camera feeds.
The first-generation edges: right now you manage the system from the iOS or Android app only. The desktop app doesn’t support it, and there’s no web interface yet (UGREEN says a web version launches October 30). Eight feeds isn’t enough for a lot of homes, especially when one camera can take two. The 12-task budget means choosing which detections matter on which cameras. And I don’t see a way to add other household users.
Questions I’ve sent UGREEN and don’t have answers to yet: the maximum Matter device count, whether Zigbee, Z-Wave or Thread add-ons are coming, limits on Custom Modes and automations, the final storage and RAID options (it did offer RAID 0 at setup), whether stored video is encrypted, how video gets to your phone, and how facial recognition data is stored. I’ll update this post as answers come in.
Highlight Moments is on the roadmap. The idea is that the HA100 picks interesting events out of your camera history and turns them into short clips, a bit like the videos Google Photos makes of your kids. UGREEN says it’s coming in the next few weeks. I haven’t tested it, so treat it as a preview. There’s also an AI model store with one model in it so far, which suggests you’ll be able to swap in newer models later.
Home Assistant is running underneath
This is the part a lot of you will care about. UGREEN’s smart home system is built on Home Assistant. There’s a Home Assistant core running inside UGOS, powering the smart home side of the app.
So I did what you’d do: typed the IP address with :8123 on the end. Sure enough, there’s a Home Assistant login prompt. The problem is that UGREEN set it up with an internal account, and I don’t have the credentials. When I asked, UGREEN said they’re basing a lot of the automation infrastructure on Home Assistant, but it isn’t intended to be a Home Assistant box.
It does run Docker, and you can load your own containers. The Matter server and Home Assistant each run in their own container. That raises a lot of questions, and they deserve their own video.
Verdict: did UGREEN keep it local?
The claim I cared about wasn’t the AI branding. It was the word “local.” A NAS, an NVR, a smart home hub and an AI assistant in one box sounds great right up until all four depend on someone else’s server staying online.
That’s not what happened. With the HomeAgent and its cameras blocked from the internet, it recorded, analyzed footage, searched events, answered voice questions, ran Matter automations, served files, and kept the Wi-Fi and third-party cameras online. That’s the foundation this product needed to show me, and it did.
The first-generation parts are the limits: 8 feeds, 12 AI tasks, a Home Assistant core you can’t get into, no clear answer yet on how much of the AI hardware developers or Docker containers can use, and open questions on storage, Matter scale and security. I’d want those answered before calling it a replacement for an established NVR or smart home platform.
But the local architecture isn’t just a line on the spec sheet. I took the internet away and the important parts kept working.
Pricing (as of October 15, 2026)
The HA100 standard, the model I tested, is listed at a $799 Super Early Bird price against a $1,599 MSRP. You don’t pay that up front. A $50 reservation deposit holds the 50% discount, and UGREEN says the deposit is refundable until the Kickstarter campaign ends. Deposits run through October 26, the Kickstarter opens October 27, and UGREEN lists late January 2027 for HA100 shipping. UGREEN’s current free gift for eligible HA100 backers is a SynCare ID500 Pro, with terms on their page.
The lineup also includes a more powerful HA100 Pro, a Master Agent version, a solar camera, a smart speaker and an e-ink display. I haven’t tested any of those.
Who it’s for, and who should skip it
- Reserve one if you want local recording, AI search and voice control in one box, your setup fits inside eight feeds, and what works today is enough for you.
- It’s also a fit if your existing cameras support ONVIF or RTSP and you want AI detection added to them.
- Skip it for now if you need more than eight feeds, or detection turned on for everything on every camera.
- Skip it if you need full Home Assistant access or a desktop or web interface today.
- Skip it if you’d be buying for the roadmap.
My rule for any crowdfunding pre-order is the same: decide based on what exists today, not the roadmap. And the $50 is a deposit, not the price.
What’s next
The next video digs into the Home Assistant core, third-party devices, Matter onboarding and how open UGREEN has made this ecosystem. It lands in late October, around when the Kickstarter opens.
If you want local AI detection on the cameras you already own, start with my Frigate and Home Assistant guide.
Products in this video
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