For twenty years, putting cameras in a building meant putting a recorder in that building too. Synology Surveillance365 removes that requirement entirely. Launched globally on 22 July 2026, Surveillance365 is a Video Surveillance as a Service platform: your cameras record to a microSD card inside the camera, and you manage the whole fleet from a browser or phone. There is no NAS, no NVR, no server to rack. The Standard plan is free with Synology cameras, which makes Surveillance365 the cheapest way to get a managed multi-site camera system running today. This guide walks through what it is, how to set it up in four steps, how it compares with Surveillance Station, and — importantly — the limits nobody mentions in the launch material.

SynoPower Club Point：I spent years at Synology headquarters handling support tickets, and the multi-site question came up constantly: a customer with nine shops, nine little NAS boxes, nine VPN tunnels, and one very tired IT person driving between them. Surveillance365 is aimed squarely at that person. But do not read “cloud” as “no homework” — the free plan has a relay limit that will surprise you the first time you try to watch four sites at once from an airport. Read the limits section before you commit a whole estate to it.

What Is Synology Surveillance365?

Surveillance365 is Synology’s cloud-managed video surveillance platform, known in the industry as VSaaS. Instead of a local server recording your streams, each compatible Synology camera records to its own microSD card and reports to a cloud portal that you sign into from anywhere.

That architecture matters more than it sounds. Because footage stays on the camera, your internet connection is not carrying continuous video — Synology quotes a Low Bandwidth Mode that reduces usage by up to 50% again on top of that. The AI analysis also happens on the camera rather than in the cloud, so alerts fire immediately and you are not paying for cloud inference.

Deployment is genuinely quick. Synology claims two minutes per camera, and that matches what I see in practice: power the camera, insert the card, add it in the portal. No port forwarding, no VPN, no static IP.

Surveillance365 vs Surveillance Station: Which Do You Need?

These are two different products that happen to share a vendor, and choosing wrongly is expensive. The short version: Surveillance Station is a full NVR that lives on your NAS; Surveillance365 is a cloud manager for cameras that record to themselves.

	Überwachungsstation	Surveillance365
Where it runs	On your Synology NAS	Synology’s cloud portal
Where footage lives	NAS drives	microSD in each camera
Hardware needed	A NAS, plus drives	Cameras only
Device license	Required beyond the 2 bundled	Not required on the free plan
Third-party cameras	Yes, very broad support	Synology cameras only
Best for	One site, long retention, mixed camera brands	Many small sites, no local IT

If you already own a NAS and a handful of cameras at one address, Surveillance Station remains the stronger option — deeper recording rules, longer retention on cheap local storage, and support for almost any ONVIF camera. Our Surveillance Station deployment guide covers that path, and you will need device licenses beyond the two your NAS includes.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Surveillance365 can also back up recordings from an existing Surveillance Station NAS to the cloud, which is the cheapest insurance available against somebody stealing the recorder along with the laptops.

What You Need Before You Start

• A compatible Synology camera — the platform works with Synology’s own cameras only, so check the model against Synology’s compatibility list before ordering
• A microSD card for each camera, since this is where footage actually lives
• A Synology-Konto with multi-factor authentication enabled
• PoE for each camera, either a PoE switch or an injector
• An ordinary internet connection — no static IP, no port forwarding, no VPN

Note what is not on that list: a NAS, an NVR, a server, or a camera license. That is the whole point of the product.

Synology Surveillance365 Setup in 4 Steps

What the On-Camera AI Detects

All analysis runs on the camera itself, which is why alerts arrive immediately rather than after a round trip to a data centre. The detection types available are:

• People detection — distinguishes a person from moving foliage or a passing animal, which is what removes most false alarms
• Vehicle detection — cars, vans and motorcycles entering the frame
• Intrusion detection — fires only when something crosses into a zone you draw, not the whole picture
• Loitering detection — flags a person who stays in an area longer than a threshold you set, which is the one retail managers ask for by name

Loitering is the addition worth calling out. Standard motion alerts tell you somebody walked past; loitering tells you somebody is still standing by the back door four minutes later. That distinction is the difference between an alert you ignore and an alert you act on.

How Multi-Site Businesses Use Synology Surveillance365

The clearest fit is a chain of small premises. Picture six coffee shops: previously that meant six recorders, six maintenance visits and six sets of remote-access headaches. With Surveillance365 each shop gets cameras and nothing else, and the area manager sees all six sites in one browser tab.

Construction sites are the second obvious case, and arguably the better one. A site office is temporary by definition, and nobody wants to install and later recover a NAS from a portacabin. Cameras that record to themselves and report to the cloud can be moved between sites as the job progresses.

Warehouses and depots benefit differently: the value there is the audit log and sub-account permissions on the Business plan. A shift supervisor can review their own site without being handed keys to the entire estate, and every review is recorded.

Where it fits poorly is a single site that already owns a NAS. If your recorder is already sitting there with spare drive bays, local storage is dramatically cheaper per day of retention than any cloud subscription.

Standard vs Business: What the Paid Plan Adds

Capability	Standard (free)	Business (paid)
Camera setup and configuration	Ja	Ja
Multi-camera live view and playback	Ja	Ja
AI detection with notifications	Ja	Ja
Continuous recording to microSD	Ja	Ja
Remote viewing relay	1 hour per day, per camera	Unlimited
Sub-account permissions	NEIN	Ja
Multi-site management	NEIN	Ja
Activity logs and history	NEIN	Ja

The row that decides it for most people is the relay allowance. On the free plan you get one hour per day per camera of remote viewing through Synology’s relay. For a homeowner checking a driveway that is plenty. For a manager who leaves a live wall open on a second monitor all afternoon, it is not, and the Business plan becomes mandatory rather than optional.

Synology has not published Business plan pricing publicly, so budget for it by asking for a quote rather than assuming. The Standard plan, to be clear, is genuinely free and perpetual with Synology cameras — not a trial.

Cloud Backup and Retention Explained

Recording to a microSD card inside a camera has an obvious weakness: steal the camera, steal the evidence. Optional cloud backup closes that hole by copying footage to Synology’s C2 storage.

Billing is by total storage capacity across your account rather than per camera, which suits estates with a mix of busy and quiet sites. Retention presets run at 45, 90 and 180 days, and the platform supports retention as long as 3,650 days — ten years — for organisations with regulatory obligations.

Everything is protected by a C2 Encryption Key held exclusively by the account holder, and the platform is stated to be NDAA and TAA compliant, which matters if you sell to government or federally funded customers.

Where to Find More Official Resources

Synology’s official Surveillance365 pricing page is the authoritative source for plan features and storage tiers, and it is updated more often than the launch coverage. The Synology surveillance hub covers how the cloud platform sits alongside Surveillance Station.

On our side, if you are weighing cameras rather than platforms, our Synology BC510 review goes through the current models in detail — including the licensing change in the 510 series, which is closely related to the arrival of this cloud platform.

Synology publishes a dedicated setup video for the Surveillance365 route of each camera, separate from the Synology NAS version — a useful reminder that these really are two different products built on the same hardware.

Limits to Know Before You Commit to Surveillance365

First and most restrictive: it works with Synology cameras only. Surveillance Station happily records almost any ONVIF camera on the market, but the cloud platform does not. If you have an existing estate of third-party cameras, this is not a migration path — it is a replacement project.

Second, the one hour per day per camera relay cap on the free plan is easy to overlook and easy to exceed. Test your actual viewing habits during the first week rather than discovering the ceiling during an incident.

Third, your recordings live on a memory card in a device mounted outdoors. Cards wear out, and a failed card is a silent failure — the camera keeps streaming live while saving nothing. Use endurance-rated cards, and check card health on a schedule rather than assuming.

Fourth, retention on the card is bounded by card size, not by your wishes. Continuous high-resolution recording fills a card quickly. If you need weeks rather than days, you are buying cloud backup, and that changes the economics considerably compared with local drives.

Fifth, the C2 Encryption Key is genuinely unrecoverable. That is a security feature and a footgun in equal measure. Print it, store it somewhere physical, and do not keep the only copy in the same account it protects.

Finally, Business plan pricing is not public at the time of writing. If your deployment needs multi-site management or sub-accounts, get a written quote before committing an estate to Surveillance365, because the free tier will not carry a real multi-site operation on its own.

Verweise

• Synology C2 — Surveillance365 plans and pricing, the authoritative feature comparison
• PR Newswire — Synology unveils Surveillance365, the official launch announcement
• Synology — Surveillance solutions overview
• TechPlugged — Surveillance365 launch analysis
• Synology — BC510 camera specifications

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