Furbo 360° Dog Camera Review

I had way too much fun testing the Furbo 360° Dog Camera thanks to its treat-tossing feature. My two senior husky mixes—Sammy and Emerson—caught on to the game instantly, and the motion and noise didn’t send my cats into a panic. A total win-win! 

I also gained some insight into what my pets do when alone (a lot of snoozin’) and how much they bark when I’m not there to hush them (thankfully not too much). Plus, I got tons of adorable perky-ear screenshots to add to my collection and instant peace when I worried about them during a thunderstorm.   

The Furbo was easy to set up and has surprisingly good camera quality with just a slight lag at times. I’ll walk you through the free and premium features so you can decide if it’s the best pet camera for your dog too.

Setting up the Furbo 360° Dog Camera couldn’t be easier. You plug it into an outlet and wait for a blinking light to appear at the base, which doesn’t take long. Meanwhile, you need to download the free Furbo smartphone app and create an account. 

Once you’ve signed in, the app will automatically walk you through the connection process. Some of the steps include turning on your phone’s Bluetooth signal and entering your Wi-Fi password. 

I always hold my breath when a product has to connect to my Wi-Fi. A few smart home devices never get past this stage of testing. But the Furbo did just fine and connected after a few seconds.

Here’s one of my few complaints about the Furbo: it has to be placed on a table that’s within about 15 feet of your internet router and, of course, within about 6 feet of an outlet. For me, that meant I could only put it in the living room.

Fortunately, that’s exactly where my couch potatoes hang out, so it wasn’t a big deal. But if I wanted to make sure they weren’t getting into trouble elsewhere in the house, I’d have to move my router and cross my fingers that an internet cable existed nearby.

You need to do a little training with your dog to help them understand the treat-tossing game, but Furbo gives you instructions and resources to make this easy. You start by letting your dogs watch you load the treats into the Furbo, and then you feed them a couple of treats by hand near the Furbo. Finally, you toss the treats on the ground while standing next to the Furbo.

When your dog can successfully find the treats you tossed, you can launch one from the Furbo. Just open the app, tap the camera view, and then tap the cookie icon in the center of the screen.

The Furbo will make a squeaky toy sound and then fire out a treat. Soon, your dog will start to associate the squeaky sound with an impending treat launch and will come to the Furbo. This makes it easier to call your dog to the camera when you want to make sure they’re okay. Alternatively, you can replace the squeaky sound with your own 6-second recording. 

If the Furbo hears your dog barking, it sends you a push notification so you can check the camera. I can’t say whether my dogs ever barked and the Furbo didn’t catch it, but every time I got a barking alert, my dogs were truly barking. So far, this feature seems accurate.

To fuss at your barking dogs from afar, all you have to do is tap the microphone icon in the bottom right corner. I was skeptical that this would work since neither of my dogs seems to recognize my voice over FaceTime. 

But, it did the trick. I said, “Emerson!” and he whipped around to look for me. I’m not sure if he understood his name or just reacted to the noise, but he did stop barking and moved away from the window. 

The Furbo’s audio quality is good—no alien-esque garbles. I went to the other end of the house with the app while my partner stayed in the living room with the Furbo. We could easily carry on a conversation. And when I recorded a custom “treat alert” message, it came through clearly.

This Furbo camera defaults to 720p after setup, which seemed clear enough. If you want better image quality, you can change it to 1080p in the settings menu. Or, if you have a weak internet connection, you can go down to 360p. 

Honestly, I couldn’t really tell the difference between the camera quality settings. In theory, 360p should’ve looked horrible. But it got the job done. And in some of my test screenshots and recordings, 720p looked better than 1080p. Go figure.

Bottom line—the quality is good, even with night vision. You won’t be able to count the whiskers on your dog’s snout, but you’ll see what they’re up to day or night without thinking, “I paid over $200 for this?”

The Furbo 360° Dog Camera pans left and right to give you a full view of the room, but it doesn’t tilt up and down. If the dogs got really close to it, I could see only their ears.

The camera also has 4x digital zoom capabilities. Just pinch the screen to get a closer look.

The Furbo can also lock on to your dog and follow their movement so that they stay in frame. It's more useful if you're paying for Furbo Dog Nanny, which automatically records clips for you when your dog walks into view. I wasn’t a fan of this feature in live mode since it lagged slightly and kind of made me dizzy. I chose to disable it in the settings.

I was pleasantly surprised that Furbo lets you save screenshots and 1-minute recordings for free. Just tap the camera or video icons on the screen when your pet does something cute. The photo or video saves to your camera’s usual photo album. (Don’t forget to allow the Furbo app to access all photos.)

I’d like to see a privacy shutter in the next iteration of the Furbo 360° Dog Camera. You can turn off the camera in the app, but that also means you won’t get any alerts.

It’s just a little awkward to share camera apps with other people while not having the ability to physically block the camera lens. At least the Furbo’s status light comes on when the live feed is active so you know someone’s watching. 

That said, it’s easy enough to drape a towel over the camera since the Furbo is meant to be kept in an easy-to-reach location for treat refills.

Dog Nanny is Furbo’s premium subscription. It costs $6.99 a month and unlocks some extra functionality:

• Doggie diary—prepares a 60-second, fast-forward compilation of the best clips recorded between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
• Camera schedule—set limited hours for the camera to be active
• Connection alerts—lets you know if the Furbo is disconnected from Wi-Fi or its power supply

You can get a slight discount if you pay for 1 or 2 years of Furbo Dog Nanny upfront, and each Dog Nanny account works with up to four Furbo cameras.

I signed up for the free trial of Furbo Dog Nanny to see if those extra alerts were accurate. Sometimes it mistook me for a dog instead of a person, and the activity alerts rolled in constantly. But it was fun to see the automatically-recorded clips. (I think everything my dogs do is cute!) You can also provide feedback about what your dog was doing in each clip to help Furbo’s AI engine categorize the clips.

I was a little disappointed to see that clips are stored on the cloud for just 24 hours. Make sure you download any keepers to your phone on a regular basis.

We consider the Furbo 360° Dog Camera the champion of all pet cameras. It gives you plenty of functionality for free, and the upgraded perks are worth it. But it’s not the only pet cam on the market. Here are some of the major differences between the Furbo 360° Dog Camera and its competitors:

• The Furbo’s cloud storage lasts 24 hours, whereas the Petcube Bites 2 stores clips for 90 days.
• There’s no local storage option with the Furbo. Try the Eufy Pet Camera instead if that’s a deal-breaker. You’ll sacrifice a little bit of zoom and the Alexa skill, but it’s a very similar product. 
• The Furbo has to sit on a table, whereas the Petcube Bites 2 can mount on a wall. Or, try the Skymee Owl Robot, which you can drive around the house.
• The Nooie Dog Camera costs significantly less than the Furbo and has vertical tilt capabilities. Because it alerts you to any noise and doesn’t toss treats, it may be better for cats or reserved dogs.

From an aesthetic perspective, the Furbo 360° Dog Camera is definitely the prettiest of the bunch thanks to its wooden top and sleek hourglass shape. It doesn’t look awkward or cheap, allowing it to blend into the décor.

The Furbo 360° Dog Camera is a high-quality pet camera. It goes above and beyond a basic indoor surveillance camera with some excellent dog-specific features, including treat tossing and bark alerts. It was a big hit with my dogs, even though they’re on the sleepy side. 

Plus, I love that the Furbo 360° is good enough to be an indoor security camera in its own right. It’s worth the money and would make a great gift for pet parents.

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1. Furbo, “Durable Dog Camera.” Accessed July 6, 2022.