Eufy E340 vs. Ring and Nest: Pick the Right Doorbell

Buy the Eufy E340 if the downward-facing second camera and free local storage matter more to you than Eufy’s 2022 privacy history — that history is real, but it’s also three years old and independently audited. If you want the biggest ecosystem or the least trust required in any single company, the honest picks are Ring or Reolink respectively, and each comes with a specific trade you should see spelled out before you buy.

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The dual-camera package view is a real, measurable difference

The E340 is not marketing a gimmick. It runs two separate 2K sensors: one at head height for the person at the door, one angled down at the porch floor, specifically so a package left below the frame of a normal doorbell camera still gets recorded. Eufy’s own spec sheet lists a 160-degree viewing angle split across the pair, with color night vision effective to about 16 feet.

Neither rival does this. The Ring Battery Doorbell Plus (2nd Gen) uses one sensor with a 140° x 140° “Head-to-Toe” field of view — wide, but still one angle, so a box set down close to the door can sit outside the useful frame. The Google Nest Doorbell (Battery) uses a 145-degree diagonal lens in a 3:4 aspect ratio, which does a reasonable job catching a porch mat in the lower part of the same single frame, but it’s still one camera doing two jobs. Only the E340 gives the package its own dedicated camera rather than asking one wide lens to cover both.

What Eufy actually did wrong, and what’s changed since

In November 2022, security researcher Paul Moore and later The Verge demonstrated that Eufy’s cloud infrastructure was receiving facial-recognition thumbnails even from devices set to local-only storage, that deleted data wasn’t actually removed from Eufy’s servers, and that live video could be streamed from some cameras through the open-source VLC player with no real authentication check. Anker, Eufy’s parent company, initially denied this to The Verge and was then shown to be wrong; it subsequently admitted the encryption gaps and committed to moving every Eufy camera onto WebRTC with AES/RSA encryption.

In March 2023, Eufy brought in cybersecurity consultant Ralph Echemendia to run a six-month audit covering both proactive security (ISO-27001/27701 and ETSI-303645 compliance, penetration testing, encryption) and reactive security (access management, incident response). Eufy’s own community post says the assessment, delivered that September, found the company met all benchmarks reviewed — though Eufy has not published the underlying findings for outside verification. Consumer Reports’ more recent testing of the E340 specifically rates its data security as “very good” but its data privacy as only “mediocre,” which is a fair summary of where things actually stand: the encryption holes from 2022 appear to be closed, but Eufy’s transparency about what it collects hasn’t fully caught up.

The subscription math is where the ecosystems actually diverge

This is the part worth being specific about, because it’s where the E340’s advantage compounds. Eufy’s built-in 8GB of onboard storage holds roughly 90 days of clips at typical usage with no subscription, no HomeBase, and no monthly account of any kind — Delivery Guard’s package alerts and pickup reminders are included in that, not gated behind a paywall.

Ring works the opposite way. Ring’s own product page confirms that a Ring Protect plan is required just to record and review footage at all — without it you get live view and a doorbell chime, nothing saved. Package alerts specifically are also called out as a Protect-only feature. Nest splits the difference: Google gives three hours of free event history with no subscription, more than Ring’s zero, but a Nest Aware subscription is still required to get 30-day history or Familiar Face alerts.

Future camera expansion favors whichever ecosystem you’re already in

If you plan to add more cameras later, that decision is really about which company’s hub already suits your house, not about the doorbell itself. Eufy’s optional HomeBase 3 (S380) expands local storage up to 16TB and lets additional Eufy battery cameras and floodlights record to the same local system with no per-camera cloud fee — the E340 doesn’t need it to function, but it’s the upgrade path if you’re building out a full local-only Eufy system. Ring’s expansion path runs through its Stick Up Cams and Spotlight Cams, all under the same Protect subscription, with the deepest Alexa integration of the four. Nest’s path runs through Google Home-branded cameras and displays. None of the three requires HomeKit, since none of these four doorbells supports Apple’s ecosystem at all.

Which one to actually buy

Skip the Ring Battery Doorbell Plus for this specific question. It’s the doorbell most people default to because of the Alexa tie-in and the size of Ring’s camera lineup, but it charges monthly for the exact two things this comparison is about — recorded footage and package alerts — while still not giving you a second camera angle for the package itself. It’s the right buy only if you’re already deep in Alexa and have decided the subscription is worth it for reasons that have nothing to do with packages.

Consider the Google Nest Doorbell (Battery) if the household already runs on Google Home displays and speakers; its free three-hour history is a genuine edge over Ring’s nothing, even though it still asks one lens to do a dual camera’s job.

Consider the Reolink Battery Doorbell if the 2022 Eufy history is a dealbreaker on principle rather than something you’re willing to weigh against the 2023 audit — Reolink’s footage never touches a company cloud tier at all, local or optional, which sidesteps the trust question entirely. The cost is giving up the second camera angle that makes the E340 worth discussing in the first place, and a thinner set of smart-display integrations than Ring or Google offer.

For everyone else weighing this specific trade — a real downward package camera, genuinely free storage, and a security incident that’s closed but not forgotten — the Eufy E340 is the buy.