The most useful thing I can tell you is that the choice that matters is not the brand. It is whether the monitor uses your home network at all, and that decision is made once, at purchase, and cannot be changed afterwards with a setting.
There are two fundamentally different products being sold under the same name.
The first is a closed system: a camera in the nursery and a dedicated handheld display, talking to each other directly over a radio link, usually frequency-hopping spread spectrum on 2.4GHz. No app, no router, no cloud, no account. It works on the day you take it out of the box, it keeps working when your internet goes down, and the video of your nursery never leaves your house. Latency is essentially zero, which matters more than people expect when you are listening rather than watching.
The second is a Wi-Fi camera you view through a phone app. It lets you check in from anywhere, which is genuinely valuable if you are out for the evening and someone else is watching the baby, or if you travel. It also means the video goes through a vendor's servers, the monitor depends on your router being up, and you have added a device that needs firmware updates and a password policy.
Neither is wrong. What is wrong is buying the second one while expecting the first one's behaviour, which is what a lot of the one-star reviews are actually about.
If you want to watch from anywhere, buy the Wi-Fi type and accept the trade. If you want something that simply works, every night, for years, with nothing to maintain, buy the closed type. I own both and I reach for the closed one on ordinary nights.
Once you have made that decision, here is what actually affects daily use.
Night performance, because a nursery at 2am is genuinely dark. Infrared is not optional, it is the whole product. Two details matter: the infrared should be invisible rather than a visible red glow, because a red LED across a sleeping baby's room is more disruptive than you would think — that is the 940nm versus 850nm distinction, and 940nm is the right answer here even though it gives slightly less range. Range does not matter much anyway when the camera is two metres from the cot.
Audio quality matters more than video. Most of the time you are listening, not watching. Look for a monitor with a proper sound-activated mode, where the screen stays off and wakes when the baby makes noise, and check that the sensitivity is adjustable — a monitor that wakes you for every rustle is worse than no monitor, because you stop trusting it.
Video latency and frame rate. Wi-Fi monitors commonly run one to three seconds behind, and that shows up as a stuttery image rather than a real-time one. Fine for checking in. Less fine if you are trying to work out whether that noise was a cry or a cough.
Temperature and humidity sensors: treat these as a rough guide, not a measurement. The sensor is next to the electronics, which generate their own heat, so readings commonly sit one or two degrees off the actual room temperature. They are useful for noticing a change, not for judging whether the room is too warm.
Privacy, if you went the Wi-Fi route. Check three things before you buy: does it work on your local network without a cloud account as a fallback, does the vendor support two-factor authentication, and can you disable remote access entirely when you want to. Also worth a search on whether the brand has had a breach, because this category has a poor history, and the reason is that a nursery camera is a device people forget to update.
Battery life on the parent unit. If you are buying a closed system with a handheld display, the display is what you will be carrying around at night, and a unit that needs to be back on charge by midnight is an annoyance you will feel every single night. Look for a stated figure in the region of eight to ten hours of screen-off standby, and treat anything quoted only "with the screen on" as optimistic.
A few things I would not pay for: remote pan and tilt on a Wi-Fi model you can only drive through an app with a two-second delay; lullabies and built-in night lights (a separate white noise machine does both jobs better and you will not be woken when the monitor moves); and any subscription that gates basic features behind a monthly fee, because this is a product you should be able to rely on for years without a recurring charge.
For twins, the practical question is whether one parent unit can display two cameras at once. Some do split-screen, some require you to toggle, and toggling at 3am is exactly as annoying as it sounds. Check that specific capability rather than assuming it.
I work on the manufacturing side of smart home hardware, so I see the component and firmware decisions behind these rather than the marketing. The two that matter in this category are whether the infrared is genuinely invisible and whether the audio path is reliable, and both are things you can only judge from using one for a week.
If it helps to see what is available: https://xingliaoshop.com/product-category/baby-monitor/
Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.
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