The Best Smart Bird Feeders of 2024 (2024)

So many reasons contributed to the Netvue bird feeder winning the top spot in our guide to smart bird feeders.

First off, it comes with a solar panel. This means you don’t have to remove the camera to charge it. The camera’s 1080p picture quality is quite clear day and night. Wi-Fi is simple to connect.

Netvue’s exclusive smart security app comes free or with a $4.99 monthly fee depending on whether you buy the AI version, which we tested, or the Lite version. It sends alerts when birds land to feed, and you can stream live video. The app will even try to identify the type of bird, although the Netvue’s attempts at this were not as accurate as the Bird Buddy or the Soliom BF08—and honestly, some guesses made us laugh out loud.

From a practical standpoint, the Netvue is easy to load with birdseed, whether you’re using black oil sunflower seeds or a nut and berry mix. You simply flip open the roof and pour the seed in, which slides down into a tray.

When mounting the Netvue, there are three options. The feeder includes a bracket to mount to a wall, a strap to wrap around a tree or post, and hose clamps for mounting to a pole. We used the strap method. It is the easiest to use for all the smart feeders we tested.

While its build is adequate, it is more sturdy than the Soliom or the Bird Buddy. While the feeder stood strong, including its durable perch, it, unfortunately, didn’t take long for squirrels to demolish its Wi-Fi antenna—although it still worked even though it ended up just dangling.

The Netvue is the only smart bird feeder of the test group that comes with a baffle, but it doesn't execute well. The hole is small, the snaps are tough to secure, and too narrow to stop squirrels from climbing right around it.

Despite a few negatives, our overall experience with the Netvue Birdfy AI was excellent! Read our full Netvue Birdfy review.

$210.40 from Amazon

The Soliom BF08 smart bird feeder offers the sturdiest build among our test subjects by a landslide. It is also the heaviest, made of metal and acrylic. The roof locks in, and both it and the perch screw on tightly. It also features the widest opening, making pouring bird food incredibly easy without creating a colossal mess. Likewise, the food slides easily into the pan and doesn’t get jammed, even if your feed contains larger nuts.

Mounting options for this feeder are via a bracket, so we attached it to a tree about 5 feet from the ground. The process is easy, but the included screws were difficult to drill into the tree. The Soliom stood the test of squirrel and raccoon visitors, remaining firmly on the tree without damage to the feeder itself.

Soliom’s camera capabilities are excellent in any kind of light environment. However, the Wi-Fi is unable to connect to a 5GHz Wi-Fi network.

When it comes to the app, you’ve got a choice. You can connect via the VicoHome: Security Camera App, which a few of the feeders use, or via Soliom’s exclusive app. We tried both, and recommend the latter. It is a more user-friendly app experience, and it also offers bird recognition software that performs with average accuracy. You can live stream video in both, and each also saves video clips of your feathered friends.

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The FeatherSnap Scout smart birdfeeder has a lot of pros. It’s as sturdy as they come, challenging the Soliom for strength of build. It has not one but two compartments to fill with different bird seeds, and that’s easily accessible under the roof—it also securely snaps shut making it hard for a raccoon to open it. Everything you need to mount the feeder to a tree is included. Camera clarity both day and night on its live feed, as well as both video and snapshot capture, is excellent.

Where this smart bird feeder varies from the rest is with its bird identification app. Others in our test pool use software that examines a photo of a visiting bird, the Scout’s app asks the user if they recognize the bird species. If not, the user then has a choice to identify with Bird ID (a series of questions the user answers manually to prompt an ID) or with AI (which calls up a grid of potential candidates for the user to match). Once ID’d, the user can save it to the app’s Bird Book. While this is an interesting method of identification, it leaves a lot more room for error, especially when the user is just starting to get into birdwatching as a hobby.

FeatherSnap’s Scout’s only true con is that it easily serves up dinner to squirrels, with a wide base, sturdy perch, and generous feed holes. We had a squirrel clean this feeder out over the course of a few hours one afternoon.

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We first heard about Bird Buddy at CES back in January 2022, and have been dying to try this bird feeder with a camera ever since.

The adorable, contemporary design appealed to us first—sorta Scandi in style. It comes in either a sunny yellow or bold teal color. The feeder is small compared to other smart bird feeders on the market right now. It’s constructed well, and there are no delicate attachments that backyard critters could destroy. Plus, you can fill it with seeds easily thanks to a cup that’s included. This may seem silly but is a huge boon.

As our choice for the Best AI Recognition, it should come as no surprise that Bird Buddy’s app and ID software are spot on. Despite water spots occasionally popping up on the camera lens, we didn’t experience any mislabeled birds, even on rainy and gray days.

Bird Buddy’s exclusive app is a delight to use, especially for freshman birders, as it “unlocks” new species and puts them into your “collection.” The app takes still photos and videos. It doesn’t double as a smart home security app as the others do, so you don’t have to wade through extra features and functions in search of your American Goldfinch pics and videos. Unfortunately, the camera sleeps in the dark and does not include night vision.

We had two gripes with Bird Buddy. Firstly, we tested the base model, which does not include a solar panel. While you can buy a solar roof for an additional cost of $70, all the other smart feeders we tested included a solar panel with their base price. This means that you have to detach the feeder’s camera and bring it inside to charge it (via the included USB-C cable) every week or so—during testing, it never lasted up to the 15 days as listed on Bird Buddy’s website.

Our second issue revolved around mounting the Bird Buddy feeder itself. What a pain! Among the testing pool, it is the only feeder that mounts from the bottom, instead of the back. The included plastic mount base easily screws on using four included screws. Bird Buddy indicates that a standard-size bird feeder pole will fit into the mount, but after a lot of searching, we could not locate a pole, PVC pipe, wooden dowel, or metal pole at our local Home Depot and Lowe’s to fit into the hole.

Finally, we took the mount and the feeder to a local birder store where we were able to get a standard mounting pole and jam it in to fit properly. (Bird Buddy also includes a rope so you can hang the feeder if you choose, but it was too mobile, and the birds in our yard hated it.)

If you can find a standard mounting pole and you can afford to sport for a solar roof, the Bird Buddy makes an excellent choice of smart bird feeders.

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A popular Amazon purchase, the Harymor smart bird feeder competes with specialty brands like Bird Buddy and Wasserstein regarding the sturdiness of build and video camera quality. We love that it has three solar panels—two built-in on the roof and one external solar panel—and that these solar panels are included in the base price of the bird feeder. We didn't even have to pre-charge the camera before mounting it. It charged in the sun and was ready to operate the next day.

Set up is incredibly easy via the Vico Home app; Harymor does not have a proprietary app. Notifications come fast and furious, but you can set both the sensitivity of the motion detection and the amount of notifications you wish to receive, which is nice. It can save videos to the cloud or a micro SD card, or you can download the images from the app into your mobile phone's photo album.

The top of the feeder flips open, allowing you to pour seed into the central cavity, which spills into the feed tray without overflowing. Harymor also includes two ways to mount the feeder, first by screwing it into a tree or other vertical surface, or alternately with a velcro band that can wrap around. As with other feeders we've tested, the ideal place to mount the feeder is to a tree, which leaves it easily accessible to squirrels and raccoons. (You can remedy this by buying shelled seed laced with hot pepper, which critters hate but birds love.)

What we don't love about this smart feeder is its bird identification app. It claims to be able to detect both birds and humans. We've been notified many times that there is a person in the backyard when there is, in fact, no one in the backyard—a startling ping when you're not at home but your teen is. Also, it can and does try to identify birds to varying degrees of accuracy.

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The modern, natural aesthetic of this bamboo wood and black clean-lined bird feeder is what makes it stand out among its peers. It's beautiful. However, after just a few months outside, the bamboo has weathered poorly, turning blackish and unattractive. Despite that, this is one sturdily-built, and, frankly, heavy, feeder. But we were able to mount it to a tree without a problem. If you have strength issues, you'll need a pal to help with installation.

Thanks to its flat roof that opens and closes with a firm click, and a wide opening, pouring seeds and nuts into the feeder is incredibly easy. It also boasts a super sturdy perch. Unfortunately, the perch is better suited to seating squirrels comfortably than birds, and we found that most of our feed went to our furry rather than feathered friends.

Lastly, the Birdfy Bamboo comes with a solar panel included so you rarely, if ever, need to charge the camera. Wi-Fi setup is easy. Otherwise, the excellent camera and picture quality is the same at the Best Overall award-winning Netvue Birdfy. And, owners will use the same Netvue app.

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While many of the smart bird feeders we tested include attachments you can purchase separately, Birdkiss includes a cup to pour bird food and picks that you can stick into the bird feeder that holds fresh fruit (to attract, say, orioles!). And we loved these extra perks.

The camera does well, offering a nice, clean picture, even at night, when we got a crisp visual of the raccoon feeding himself from the seed tray. The Birdkiss mounts vertically to a tree, making it hard to prevent these kinds of critter encounters. While the feeder construction withstood the raccoon much better than the Wasserstein, it sustained a little damage.

When it comes to Birdkiss’ smart functionality, like the Soliom and the Baiyunsky, it uses the free version of the VicoHome app. This only saves recordings for 72 hours before they disappear—a bummer if you want to hold onto a video but don’t want to pony up the money for a monthly or annual subscription.

Overall, this is an adequate smart birdfeeder that we recommend if your yard isn’t too overrun with wildlife, but you’ll want to shop it when it’s on sale rather than pay full price, which is equivalent to our best overall pick, the Netvue.

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The Baiyunsky smart bird feeder is the least expensive of the feeders we tested, and it shows in its construction. Although the metal feeder is cute with its green schoolhouse design and white picket fence, the rooftop opening never closed snugly for us, and the black perch fell off daily. Bird food easily slid into the pan, but it was also easily accessible to squirrels wanting lunch.

The only option for mounting this bird feeder is to a tree or vertical surface, and its mounting bracket does the job. However, unlike the other feeders we tested, once you mount it, there’s no removing it from the tree without removing the screws.

A bonus: the Baiyunsky comes with a solar panel that screws into the same surface where you mount the feeder. The solar panel does a great job of keeping the camera battery fully charged.

The 1080p high-def camera connects to the VicoHome security camera app, which offers users a live feed, 10-second video clips, night vision, and the ability to control levels of motion detection and notifications. The free version of the VicoHome app only saves recordings for 72 hours, but this feeder is the only one we tested that arrived with a micro SD card, so you can save your footage easily.

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What we love about the Wasserstein Bird Feeder is that you can buy a bundle with a smart security camera that syncs with your existing system, whether you use Blink, Wyze, or Ring. We tested it with the Ring Stick Up Cam, which connected through the Ring app. Your experience with the “smart” portions of this feeder will vary based on which smart camera and app you choose.

Unfortunately, we hated using the Ring app for this function. It was hard to navigate and find the videos we wanted. Its motion detection was also super sensitive, alerting more times for branches waving in the breeze than for bird visitors.

We also didn't love the Wasserstein bird feeder’s shoddy construction. Out of the box, it’s fine. But once mounted, it can only handle the birds that visit. During testing, a raccoon and squirrels jumped aboard, causing the feeder’s bracket to bend 90 degrees so the feeder was facing the ground. The raccoon easily removed and tossed aside the feeder’s plastic tray, simply attached in just two places.

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