I like iVMS because of its price, lightest cpu load and obvious compatibility with hikvision cameras.
I haven't explored alerts yet, because my cameras are outdoors and any bug flying past at night, tree shadow moving during the day, etc etc will trip the video motion sensor, causing it to record and alert. I will explore PIR trips sensors, but the hurdle there is ideal position of the sensor vs the camera. I may just set that up for one particular camera still to be installed.
Still have to get to remote access and remote reviewing. (spent too much time trying to get other software to work and getting past some bugs or compatibilities)
iVMS seems decent. I wish it was a little bit better featured or coherent in the event search and playback department. But it can find all the clips for a certain time period and play them back simultaneously.
When it comes to video playback I'd just like to have buttons to do frame by frame, got to next clip, skip a minute ... have it a bit more video editing like controls over playback. But I'm just getting started with ivms really, and the reality is that once the cameras are up and running, have image quality, camera focus & aim, motion, recording, etc dialed in, you won't really be spending time reviewing much data unless something happened.
If one looks at hikvision cameras and thinks about rolling their own pcnvr, I'd certainly say to give ivms a look.
Though some people will swear by
blueiris for certain features; or some other software because of the number of cameras it can handle or has certain features they want or need. I really just wanted / need mine to record, invested in the cameras, network hardware and pc to make it happen (could have recycled an existing big unit, but wanted new energy efficient fast and compact) and can down the road still upgrade to any better featured pc software.
I spent a fair amount of time with axxon next. Very well featured and detailed, but has a learning curve and isn't the most intuitive. More geared to businesses who will run multiple servers and have 24/7 staffed surveillance needs. Should axxon have in camera detection for hikvision, it might work better for a small setup, but for starters, the cpu load was just too high to do video detection on many megapixel streams on a single system. What works fine for a couple cameras became a cpu issue once you reached 4 or 6 for me.
