105437. yes the built in SmartThings device handlers and smartapps do the garage door open, door open, motion, vibration action turn on lights, lock doors when you leave and a lot more.
Blue Iris is considered a custom device type with custom apps. These don't run locally (on the hub) yet to the best of my knowledge. As Cor points out, things that depend on Cloud connectivity do not run if your Internet connection is not working. Otherwise the impact of Cloud vs local processing is a matter of milliseconds. For me not an issue since the Internet rarely goes down unless we have a major area power outage that causes it. The SmartThings hub batteries only provide an hour or two of backup power IIRC.
The Blue Iris Fusion smartapps, created by a community member, is used for a number of things. For me it changes my BI profiles from #1 to #2 which changes triggers, motion sensitivity and zones, recording duration, alert rules, camera settings etc when the house goes into Away, Home, or Night mode. It also can use various z-wave or zigbee sensors - motion, open/close/vibration, doorbell, and other sensors to trigger recording in BI when things happen. And BI motion detection can turn on lights or execute any other smart device action you have configured in SmartThings with devices or virtual devices (e.g. lights or something like motion/recording/alert on porch or doorbell turns on TV or radio). This functionality and integration is all thanks to the dev community, not produced directly by SmartThings itself.
Cor, I loved Vera when I played with it 4 years ago, great community and effort, but it limited me when I was setting up our new house for certain devices or Cloud services and I couldn't get some wanted Vera to Cloud integrations. Part of it was learning on my part I'm sure. Still I wouldn't push anyone away from Vera.
SmartThings doesn't have fees for automation but they are trying to create a business model with various optional monitored home security companies and offer optional video storage kinds of packages. Those are all option add-ons that I do not think are very popular. With Samsung now owning them, I think they can generate revenue by making Samsung smart products more attractive rather than restricting growth through forced subscription fees. They are also fairly quickly moving more cloud processing to the local hub for reliability and operating costs. The majority of my core motion, open/close and lights, lock doors smartapps seem to run fine these days when I'm rebooting my cable modem or running on generator power during extended power/Internet outage. They have a lot more work to do but are moving pretty fast, especially in recent weeks. Anyway, SmartThings does have its struggles, but Cloud hiccups or local processing is rarely an issue any more for the standard part of my setup.