Quick answer: 8 GB of recording storage sits inside one of these cameras and none at all inside the other, and that one line settles most of this purchase. Put the Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro on an exterior wall where it can keep its own footage and run your Zigbee and Thread accessories at the same time; keep the Google Nest Cam (Wired, 2nd Gen) for an indoor room in a house that already lives in the Google Home app.
Bottom Line
Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro
Rated IP65, specified down to minus 30 Celsius, and built around a 1/1.8 inch sensor at 2688 by 1520 with an f/1.0 lens, so night footage holds color instead of dropping to grey infrared. It keeps 8 GB of recordings on board and speaks RTSP and SMB, and its Zigbee 3.0 and Thread radios make it a hub as well as a camera. Pick it if the camera is going outside, or if a hub purchase was coming anyway.
See Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro →Google Nest Cam (Wired, 2nd Gen)
1080p HDR across a 135 degree view, two-way audio, and person, animal and vehicle detection that runs on the camera with no plan attached. Three hours of event history comes free. It is indoor only and Google only, and that narrowness is the point: there is nothing to configure and nothing to self-host. Pick it for a nursery, hallway or home office in a Google house.
See Google Nest Cam (Wired) →These two rarely belong on the same shortlist by accident. One is an exterior camera with a smart home controller hidden in it; the other is an indoor appliance that asks nothing of you. The sections below pull apart where that difference bites.
Where the Two Cameras Actually Differ
Every cell here is a claim about the exact model linked above, not about the wider Aqara or Nest range. Aqara sells the G5 Pro in two power versions, a Power over Ethernet model and a Wi-Fi model fed by USB-C, so confirm which variant a listing resolves to before you order.
| Feature | Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro | Nest Cam (Wired, 2nd Gen) |
|---|---|---|
| Where it mounts | Outdoor, IP65 rated | Indoor only |
| Resolution | 2688 x 1520 | 1080p HDR |
| Field of view | 133° diagonal | 135° diagonal |
| Night vision | Colour, f/1.0 lens plus a 3W spotlight | Infrared, roughly 15 ft reach |
| Power | Wired: PoE or USB-C, version dependent | Plug-in adapter, 10 ft cable |
| Storage on the device | 8 GB onboard, plus RTSP and SMB to a NAS | Cloud only |
| Free event history | Local recording, no clock on it | 3 hours |
| Detection without a plan | Person, pet, vehicle, package analysed locally | Person, animal, vehicle on-camera |
| Apple Home | Yes, HomeKit Secure Video | No, Google Home only |
| Alexa and Google Home | Yes | Google Home |
| Built-in smart home hub | Zigbee 3.0, Thread border router, Matter bridge | Camera only |
| Two-way audio | Yes | Yes |
| Price | $$$ | $$ |
Price tiers are approximate. $ = under $50, $$ = $50 to 150, $$$ = $150 to 300, $$$$ = over $300. Tap any link for the current Amazon price.
Indoors or Outdoors Settles It Before Anything Else
The wired second-generation Nest Cam is the indoor member of the Nest camera family. It arrives with a plug-in adapter and a short cable, no weather sealing, and a stand meant for a shelf or a wall bracket in a dry room. Mounting it under an eave is not a compromise, it is a failure waiting for the first driving rain.
The G5 Pro is the opposite brief. Aqara rates the housing IP65, the ingress-protection code defined in IEC 60529, which means dust-tight and protected against water jets from any direction. The 6 in that code is the dust digit and the 5 is the water digit, so an IP65 camera is sealed against hose spray but is not rated for submersion. For a porch, a driveway or a side gate that is the right level of sealing. Aqara also specifies operation down to minus 30 Celsius, which matters more than most spec lines in a northern winter.
If your shortlist really is outdoor cameras, this duel is narrower than it looks and our wider security camera roundup covers battery and solar options the Nest Cam cannot answer. For the Aqara against its closest battery-powered rival, the Aqara and eufy head-to-head goes deeper on the power trade-off.
The Radios Hiding Inside the Aqara
The least obvious reason to buy the G5 Pro has nothing to do with video. Aqara put Zigbee 3.0 radios and a Thread border router inside it and exposed the result to Matter as a bridge, so Aqara door sensors, buttons and Thread accessories can join the house through the camera instead of through a separate hub puck. The manufacturer product page lists both roles on the same device.
Work out what that is worth before comparing anything else. If a hub was already in the plan, the camera absorbs that line item and the price gap against the Nest narrows considerably. If you own no Zigbee or Thread accessories and do not intend to, the radios are dead weight and you are paying premium money for an outdoor camera.
One caveat that trips people up: cameras are still not a Matter device type, so the bridge exposes the accessories joined to the G5 Pro, not the video feed. The camera itself reaches Apple Home through HomeKit Secure Video, which needs a HomePod or Apple TV in the house to do event analysis, as Apple's own setup guide spells out. No Apple home hub, no HomeKit event timeline. Our HomeKit Secure Video camera guide covers that requirement in full.
The Nest Cam holds no hub radios at all. In a Google house it does not need to: the Google Home app is the hub, and the camera is a client of it.
Storage, Plans, and What You Still Have Next Week
Here is the trade most buyers underestimate. The Nest Cam gives you three hours of free event video history. That is genuinely useful for a same-day question, as in who rang at lunchtime. It is useless for the question people actually ask a camera, which is what happened while we were away for the weekend. Extending history means a paid Google plan, and that fee never stops.
The G5 Pro writes to 8 GB of onboard storage, and a camera at this resolution chews through 8 GB faster than the number suggests, so treat the onboard flash as a buffer rather than an archive. The real answer is the camera's RTSP stream and SMB network-share support: point it at a NAS or a small always-on machine and you own the retention policy outright, with no monthly fee and no footage leaving the house. That is also the install gotcha. Nobody mentions that the useful version of this camera involves somewhere for the video to go, and if you have no NAS and no appetite for one, you are buying a 2.6K camera and keeping a few hours of it, which is roughly what the cheaper Nest does.
If a zero-subscription setup is the whole objective, the dedicated no-subscription camera picks list cameras built around local storage from the start.
What Owners Report After Living With Them
Reading verified-buyer feedback across both cameras, the themes separate cleanly rather than contradicting each other.
G5 Pro owners are consistently positive about night footage, describing color images in conditions where their previous camera went monochrome, and about the Power over Ethernet install once the cable run is done. The recurring complaints are setup effort and app depth: owners describe a settings tree that rewards patience and frustrates anyone expecting a two-tap experience, and several report that getting HomeKit Secure Video, the Aqara app and a NAS all behaving took an evening rather than ten minutes.
Nest Cam owners praise exactly the thing Aqara owners complain about. Setup is described as trivial, alerts as accurate, and Nest Hub integration as the reason they stayed in the Google ecosystem. The recurring grievance is the three-hour free history, which owners describe discovering at the worst possible moment, and a perception that the 1080p sensor is dated next to newer rivals.
Neither camera carries a pattern of hardware failure in buyer feedback. The dissatisfaction in both cases is about expectations: Aqara buyers underestimate the work, Nest buyers underestimate the subscription.
Which One Belongs On Your Wall
For a wider look at how Google's cameras hold up against the other major brand, Arlo versus Nest Cam runs the same exercise on the Google side of the fence, and the PoE camera guide is the place to start if the wired-and-powered-over-Ethernet approach appeals.
Frequently Asked Questions
How We Put This Comparison Together
Both cameras were compared from manufacturer documentation rather than from physical testing. Sensor size, resolution, aperture, field of view, ingress protection and the hub radio list for the G5 Pro come from Aqara's product and specification pages; the IP65 reading follows the code definitions in IEC 60529; the HomeKit Secure Video home-hub requirement comes from Apple's security camera setup guide. Nest Cam figures are the published specifications for the wired second-generation indoor model, and the free event-history window is Google's own stated allowance. Where retailer listings disagreed with a manufacturer spec sheet, the spec sheet won, which is why the resolution line reads 1080p HDR despite one large retailer advertising 2K.
Owner themes above are paraphrased in aggregate from verified-buyer feedback, never quoted, and no star figure is printed here because we could not confirm current listing averages in the same pass. We take no payment from Aqara, Google or any brand named on this page. If something here is wrong, please tell us and we will correct it.
Prices and availability reflect Amazon listings at time of writing. Confirm on the product page before purchase.