Stop Guessing How Many Cameras You Need: Plan the Whole System on a Map

Ask three installers how many cameras your building needs and you will get three different answers, three different prices, and no clear way to tell which one is right. Ask the internet and you get "it depends." Meanwhile the decision is genuinely hard: you are being asked to guess how many cameras, what kind, where they go, how much recording storage, and what the network has to carry — before anyone has stood on your property.

That guessing step is the part we set out to remove. The Silarius Site Planner lets you lay out the whole system yourself, on your own building, and see exactly what it costs. It is free to use.

It starts with your actual property, not a generic diagram

Type your address and the planner drops you onto satellite imagery of your own roof, driveway, parking area and fence line. You click where a camera should go and drag to aim it, and the planner draws the coverage cone over the real ground it will be watching. You can name each camera — "back dock", "register", "side gate" — and those names follow the plan all the way through to the parts list.

For indoors, satellite imagery obviously cannot help. So you can add inside floors as separate areas and either upload your floor plan — a PDF or an image, then set the scale — or sketch the rooms yourself with the drawing tools. Walls, rooms, open areas with square footage, fences and text labels are all there, which is usually enough to work out where coverage actually overlaps and where it does not.

You say what each camera has to do; it picks the model

This is the part that saves the most money. Rather than browsing a catalogue and hoping, you tell the planner the job for each position:

• General view of an area
• Recognize people
• Identify faces or read license plates
• Wide 180° coverage, for a garage, parking row or hallway
• All-around 360° from one ceiling mount
• Long-range PTZ for a big lot

From the job and the distance it has to cover, the planner selects the least expensive Silarius camera that will genuinely do it — and warns you when a position is simply too far away for the detail you asked for. That warning matters more than it sounds. A camera that technically "covers" a parking lot but cannot resolve a plate at that range is the single most common way a surveillance budget gets wasted.

It asks the question most quotes skip

Before it prices anything, the planner asks whether there is network cable at the camera positions. There are three honest answers and it handles all three: cable is already there, there is no cable and you want professional Wi-Fi cameras instead, or there is no cable and you plan to run some. Pick the third and it adds the cable to the list. Pick the second and it switches those positions to Wi-Fi models.

That one question is what separates a plan you can actually install from a shopping list that stalls on install day.

Then it builds the rest of the system around your cameras

Cameras are the visible part; the system is everything behind them. Once the layout is set, the planner sizes the rest:

• A Silarius PoE switch with enough ports and power budget for the cameras, the recorder and the router
• A recorder matched to the channel count, with the drive size calculated from how long you want to keep footage — up to six months or a year if you need it
• Connectors and cable runs
• Cloud storage, one plan per video channel

Everything is priced live from the store, so the total you see is the total you would pay today.

Cloud recording, if you want a copy off-site

Silarius Cloud can be added to any plan while you build it. It is ONVIF-based, so it works with your existing IP cameras whatever model they are — those connect through the Silarius Gateway, while newer Silarius X cameras go straight to the cloud with no gateway at all. Retention is set per camera, from a few days up to a year on standard plans, with custom plans keeping video up to three years. Footage sits on redundant, scalable cloud infrastructure, and cameras connect outbound over an encrypted tunnel, so nothing on your network is left exposed.

Doors and intercom, for whole buildings

If you are planning a building rather than a single unit, the planner covers access control too: tell it how many glass and solid doors you have, whether the main entrance is a double door, whether you want card or card-plus-PIN, and how many people need credentials. It then prices complete door hardware from several access-control brands and lets you choose between them.

It also works out the lock type for you, which is where a lot of door quotes quietly go wrong. Glass doors get magnetic locks; otherwise an electric strike is the sensible choice — and the planner will not put both on the same door, because a strike already locks it. You can override the choice if you have a reason to.

Nothing is locked down

It is your plan, so the parts list is editable. Change quantities, remove anything you do not want, put it back if you change your mind, and search the full Silarius catalogue to add anything the planner did not think of. One button undoes all your edits and returns to the recommended build.

When you are done you can add the entire system to your cart in one click, print or save the plan as a PDF, copy a link that reopens the exact plan later or sends it to a colleague, or hand it to a Silarius specialist to look over.

Why we built it

Security systems are bought by people who are not security professionals, from people who benefit from them not knowing much. We would rather hand you the same design logic our own team uses, let you see every part and every price, and let you change your mind as many times as you like before spending anything.

Open the Site Planner and put your address in. Planning a system across several locations? Our guide to managing multiple sites from one dashboard is worth reading alongside it.