The Best Baby Monitor

The HelloBaby might be a standard monitor, but it excels at the basics. It scored better than some of the more expensive WiFi monitors in picture clarity, and was hands-down the easiest to use. Just open the box, plug in the two devices, and you’re ready to go. No difficult packaging to tear through, and no account setup or device pairing necessary. Our testers had it up in running in less than 3 minutes each time.

We liked the sleek look of the camera, and while the base is grippy enough to feel secure on a dresser, it can be wall mounted to get that perfect angle looking over into the crib.

Its parent display unit is the smallest we tested, with a screen only 2.4 inches wide, but the video quality was among the best. By comparison, Infant Optics’ bigger screen didn’t offer a better picture, and our Motorola model had an obvious two-second delay — even when we took it off WiFi and used its direct signal mode to rule out connectivity issues. The differences are slight, but we were impressed that the HelloBaby could keep up with monitors twice its price.

We appreciated how easy it was to use the parent unit too. “It’s like an old-generation iPod,” one tester commented, noting the circular pad in the center. Volume, screen brightness, zoom, and talk-back are all available on the home screen, so it’s still easy to find the right button when you’re half asleep at 3AM.

Among our top picks, HelloBaby made up for its smaller display size with good video quality.

A good WiFi monitor is convenient and feature-rich — or else we may as well stick with the HelloBaby. The iBaby takes both aspect to the next level. It was the fastest WiFi model to set up at only five minutes. Once you download the app, a straightforward tutorial walks you through every feature. We liked that you can choose both sensitivity levels and notification options for noise, motion, temperature, and humidity — meaning the iBaby won’t alert you to those quiet falling-asleep sounds, or small movements unless you want it to.

Even better, you’d don’t need to keep your phone turned to the app to hear your baby or receive notifications. The iBaby works both in the background and when your phone is in sleep mode.

The iBaby had all of our most critical features and more. Plus, like a recent Star Wars robot, its round camera is gosh darn cute.

We also liked the iBaby because while it allowed us to invite other users to see through the camera — great if you want to give your babysitter access while you’re out — only the person who registered the iBaby monitor has administrator access to all of the features. The administrator can give some privileges to other users, like being able to move the camera around, but they can take them away just as quickly.

The iBaby app walks you through setup (left), displays activity history (center), and allows you to adjust settings (right).

The iBaby’s video and audio quality were among the best in the WiFi group, but like all WiFi monitors, quality and how well it displays real-time action depends largely on your internet quality and speed. Our testers only experienced a delay of less than a second, more noticeable than HelloBaby’s, but nowhere close to Motorola’s three-second delay.

The biggest downside to the iBaby is that its stand doesn’t attach to a wall. It’s designed to be placed on top of a table or dresser. Luckily, it’s not likely to go anywhere — it’d need a good shove to push it off.

The Cocoon Cam brings the convenience of a WiFi monitor, while keeping its user interface simple and scoring high for picture and sound quality. So if you glanced over all the features of the iBaby and thought, “Just give me a good WiFi monitor without all that jazz,” you’ll like the Cocoon Cam.

This app-based monitor gave us better video and audio quality than the iBaby with just four customizations: volume, screen brightness, motion sensitivity, and noise threshold. Setup was on the longer side at nine minutes — you have to wait a few minutes for the monitor to sync to the WiFi and the app — but it’s not complicated.

The Angelcare AC315 earned high marks for audio and visual quality, was fairly easy to use, and comes with a movement sensor that slips under your crib’s mattress. If it ever detects more than 20 seconds of without movement, it triggers an alarm.

It’s the only monitor we tested with a touchscreen on the parent unit, though the unit we tested didn’t always recognize our clicks. Instead of buttons, the parent unit uses a touchscreen to adjust settings — but this feature actually makes the monitor harder to use. Sometimes the screen wouldn’t recognize our clicks; other times it over-clicked.

We were also disappointed that the Angelcare’s parent unit lacks an out-of-range warning. If you’re in the backyard or basement and the monitor disconnects, it’s not clear whether you’re looking at a napping baby or a frozen screen. Still, it beat out the Baby Delight for sound and video quality and offers a few customizable features: You can adjust the volume on the baby unit as well as the parent unit, and set up timed alarms and temperature alerts.

The AngelCare’s battery-operated movement sensor slips under your crib’s mattress.

Our testers preferred the Baby Delight’s parent unit — its buttons were more responsive than Angelcare and it was easier to set up. This movement monitor uses a cordless magnetic sensor instead of a pad. Because the sensor is clipped onto your baby’s onesie, right next to their chest, the alarm won’t go off if you forget to disarm it before a middle-of-the-night feeding.

However, the Baby Delight’s biggest flaw is one of technicality: Its button sensor is just large enough to avoid being labeled as a choking hazard, but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for error. In fact, the button does become a choking risk after your child is 3 years old, and the new parents we spoke to felt uneasy about using it after 12 months just to be safe. Still, if you’re only interested in monitoring movements for the first few months, the Baby Delight is a more user-friendly alternative to the Angelcare.