Our Home Security Reviews Methodology
How We Determined the Best Home Security System of 2021
Our objective is to help consumers cut through the fog of misleading and fraudulent reviews. To that end, we have analyzed and aggregated customer ratings to help find the Holy Grail of pre-purchase information: what actual users truly think of their home security purchases.
After arriving at what we deemed to be the most reliable sources, we compared and analyzed two critical sets of home security reviews:
Sales, installation, and service reviews from verified users on TrustPilot to determine the best home security system.
Ratings on the App Store and Google Play to determine the best home security app — because the app is the window into the modern home security solution.
Factors We Did Not Consider
Cost
Price is built into the customer ratings, and our research determined it to be a poor indicator of satisfaction. We would not pay $10 less a month for a system we detested, and we don’t feel you should, either.
DIY
Once again, this is about owner satisfaction, and that is our driving metric. Whether a system is professionally installed or self-installed did not factor.
Additional Factors
Monitoring Redundancy
We’ve all experienced widespread internet and/or power outages. What happens to a monitoring center if either goes down, particularly for an extended period of time? We believe that it’s best to never find out. Monitoring center redundancy matters.
Experience
It’s not reasonable to expect everyone to have been in business for over 146 years, like ADT, but two or three decades means more in this industry than two or three years. Every business has to start somewhere, but we believe they should start with someone else.
Advertiser Disclosure
HomeSecurityReviews.org is a free and independent home security reviews site. We may make money when you click on affiliate links on this site. These payments do not influence our reviews.
The Power of TrustPilot
In searching for the Holy Grail of customer reviews, we felt we needed a service with a comprehensive means of eliminating, or at least significantly reducing, fake reviews.
Sadly, much of the online body of “customer” reviews is fraudulent. Because positive ratings are essential to a product’s success, some companies will resort to fake positive reviews to boost their own standing, and fake negative reviews to hurt competitors.
We agreed upon TrustPilot’s system of review verification because we could not find another entity doing more to combat ratings fraud. More specifically, they have a team of of 70 who safeguard the legiticmacy of their platform. That team helped remove over 2.2 million fake reviews in 2020 alone.
You can learn more about how TrustPilot combats fake reviews here.
In computing the TrustScore, higher ratings are given to companies who actively solicit reviews, positive or negative, from customers. They also favor newer reviews or over older ones. This is important to us in contrasting average reviews against the TrustScore, because it allows us to see if a company is trending upward or downward.
You can learn more about the TrustScore here.
How we’ve contrasted TrustScore against average reviews is evident for each of the 11 contendors in our home security reviews overview. That’s the starting place to see how we’ve applied our home security reviews methodology.