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UniFi Protect G4 Bullet Review: Small Camera, Big Coverage

A weatherproof bullet camera that only needs one cable and already knows the difference between a person and a passing cat.

September 5, 2023
8.6/ 10
Editor's Verdict - Recommended

A sharp, weatherproof driveway camera that does its job well, as long as you've already bought into UniFi Protect.

The G4 Bullet is the camera Ubiquiti built for the spot every house has: the driveway, the side gate, the corner where a floodlight camera looks awkward and a doorbell camera can't reach. Compact, weatherproof, one PoE cable, 1440p, and it plugs straight into a UniFi Protect console like the Dream Router or a Cloud Key. Mine has been above my garage door for about six months.

Night footage is why it stays there. The IR illuminator reaches about 25 feet with enough detail to read a plate on a car parked in the driveway, faces don't wash out into white smears the way my previous cheap cameras managed, and when headlights sweep the frame the sensor recovers instead of blooming into a wall of glare. My favorite clip so far is a possum commuting across the driveway at 2:40 a.m. on a schedule so consistent I could set a watch by him. Detection files him under 'animal' every time, correctly, and separates people from vehicles close to 90 percent of the time on my Dream Router. The false alerts I get are shadows at dusk, not blowing leaves at 3 a.m.

The 2:40 a.m. possum gets filed under 'animal' every single night, and that's the product working.

Install honesty: the kit is great, the drilling template is great, and the job still took me most of an afternoon, because running cable through a finished garage wall is the actual project and no camera review tells you that. There's a filler-plugged hole an inch left of my cable where I missed the stud bay. Learn from me. The ball-and-socket mount has held its angle through a full summer, which is more than the slowly drooping cameras it replaced ever did.

The real limitation isn't the camera, it's what it requires. This thing does nothing on its own. No app, no cloud option, no standalone recording, just a PoE camera that needs a Protect console doing the thinking. Without UniFi already in the house, it's a well-built paperweight.

Against its siblings: the G4 Pro has optical zoom and more resolution for a lot more money, and the G4 Instant offers battery-powered convenience I've stopped believing in entirely. I've owned two battery cameras from other brands. Both spent their lives at 40 percent, produced choppy clips on bad Wi-Fi days, and missed the one event I bought them for. Wires or nothing is where I've landed, and I understand this makes me tedious at barbecues.

IP66 weatherproofing has survived a year of rain and one legitimately nasty hailstorm without fogging the housing. Firmware updates kept improving detection long after purchase instead of freezing at launch quality.

Anyone with a Protect console already running should just put this in the cart. It's the least dramatic hardware I own, and I mean that as high praise.

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WithHam★★★★★5 days ago

Been running two of these for a month after this review convinced me. The person versus car alerts just work, no false alarms from branches like my old cameras. Wife can check the app from work. No complaints at all.

Actualization★★★★Mar 2026

If your night footage looks washed out, the IR is bouncing off your soffit, angle the camera down five more degrees. This is basic photography and the number of misconfigured cameras posted online proves nobody reads. Mine took three remounts to get right.

ndprice★★★★★Nov 2025

A camera that does nothing without another box doing its thinking. We used to call that a defect, now it's an ecosystem. Picture's sharp, sure. So is the lock-in.

Crunchystix★★★★★Aug 2025

@ndprice that's like being mad a lightbulb needs a lamp my guy, the console IS the product. Anyway this thing caught a coyote in my yard at 2am in full detail and the clip went around the whole family chat. Worth every penny.

NeonAura★★★★May 2025

I mostly use mine to watch the foxes that cross our yard at night, which is probably not the intended use case but the IR footage of them is precious. Detection sorts them under animal correctly almost every time. Wish the mount came in white.

tobysmc★★★★Jan 2025

Solid camera. Took me and my son-in-law an afternoon to run the cable through the garage wall and it's been rock steady since. The article's right that you need the UniFi stuff already, luckily he'd set me up with a Dream Router last year.

rupay★★★★★Oct 2024

Ran the storage math nobody else will: at default bitrate you get roughly a week per camera on a 128GB microSD before overwrite, which is why the Dream Router caps at two cameras of decent quality. Buy the console with the drive bay or accept the limit. The camera itself is faultless, it's the planning people skip.

Gman8181★★★★★Jun 2024

Decent camera, but a comparable PoE unit from the commercial brands runs cheaper and works with any standard NVR. You're paying for the dashboard. Some of us remember when cameras just recorded to whatever you pointed them at.