Frigate vs SmartThings
Frigate and SmartThings are both home automation software. Frigate is open source under MIT, with 37k GitHub stars. SmartThings is a commercial product from Samsung Electronics.
Which to pick
- Pick Frigate when
- You run your own cameras and want local AI detection instead of a cloud camera service.
- Pick SmartThings when
- You own Samsung appliances or TVs and want broad device support from a mainstream app.
Side by side
A network video recorder for IP cameras that runs real-time object detection locally, recording and alerting on people, cars and other objects, with Home Assistant integration.
Samsung's smart home platform and app for controlling and automating Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter and Wi-Fi devices, often via Samsung TVs and hubs.
Needs a GPU or AI accelerator for good performance, and configuration is YAML-heavy.
Most automations rely on Samsung's cloud, and past platform changes broke custom integrations.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and mobile app
Python, TypeScript, TensorFlow and OpenCV
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Samsung Electronics
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
37k GitHub stars
486 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v0.18.2.
Not known
Other comparisons
More home automation platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.