I've tried cloud cams and a purpose-built baby cam with its own handheld device, and the Nanit Plus Baby Monitor blows both out of the water in *ALMOST* every way.
What's to like:
+Amazing picture quality. You can see every detail of your baby in both day and night conditions. Like many newborns, our baby tends to fuss when she spits out her pacifier. With our other standalone baby monitor, the picture was too grainy to see if she had her pacifier. With the Nanit, you can clearly see if the baby has her pacifier or not.
+Excellent App and set-up with iOS. We are iPhone users and the app was seamless to set-up and share parenting roles by just inviting via email. There was one minor annoyance in the app that required you to input a due date, even though our daughter was already born.
+Wonderful build quality. The cabling is that soft rubber sleeving and overall the device feels like it could be made by Apple, Samsung, or any other high-end tech/lifestyle company. The camera clicks into the wall base and there is cable covering included to protect the cable from coming loose.
+Awesome performance even away from home. I can legitimately view what is going on live in my baby's crib even when I am work with little performance quality issues. No set-up is needed, Nanit handles all of the networking from your home over the internet to your mobile device.
+Ability to keep background sound on, even while the app is not up and focused. This is important for night monitoring, you just hit the sound button on the app until the background sound is toggled and you will hear room noise even while the app is not in focus or the phone is locked.
+Easy to open the app while locked, just bring up lock screen which shows the Nanit icon and then tap it and the app opens up.
What can be improved upon:
-The "notifications" are just the phone notifications with a message bar and a ping chime, as any other notification on your phone would be. It would be nice if Nanit could somehow customize their notification to have a different chime, to chime even when the phone is in silent mode, and to maybe flash the flashlight or screen and TURN THE SCREEN ON, when the baby makes a loud noise or a lot of sustained movement. This is the one area my standalone baby monitor is better, it has a LED green or orange bar and makes a loud chime when the baby triggers.
-You can leave the screen on during the night, make sure your phone is plugged in to allow the app to stay open so you can see your baby, but this can be a problem for OLED phones and burn-in.
-The Nanit Insight is an awesome sleep metrics tracker, but its behind a subscription. While the subscription is a reasonable $50 a year, it would be nice if this was included for free with such an expensive device that is really just a solid cloud cam and excellent software that runs on YOUR expensive and powerful phone as the monitor device.
-Does require relatively modern/powerful hardware. Our iPad Mini would not run the Nanit app adequately. Very slow start-up and laggy/grainy picture.
-Alexa integration is nominal. Just a few chat voice tricks but no native app or ability to view your baby on an Echo Show or Spot like you can with Amazon Web Cams.
Overall this is an excellent Baby monitor, possibly the best one, and it will only continue to get better. Lets hope they integrate some of these suggestions in the app instead of a new generation of hardware, because it is possible to do so without charging the customer for an upgrade.