Written and fact-checked by Roman Gaufman, Founder & CEO, TetherX

WHERE RHOMBUS LOCKS IN

Open language, closed ecosystem.

A one-way drawbridge

Rhombus Relay bridges an existing camera in over ONVIF or RTSP, so the marketing is honest about openness. Nothing bridges out. Every camera you add after the first job is a Rhombus camera, and ten years of refresh cycles are decided the day the first purchase order is signed.

Price stability, on a licence that still bricks

Credit where it is due: Rhombus held its November 2025 price sheet through the Verkada, Avigilon Alta and Brivo mid-2026 hike window, and publishes it openly. The stability is real. What you buy with it is a licence IPVM files alongside Verkada and Meraki as "Hostage as a Service". Sensors and access doors bill separately on top.

A ceiling around 1,000 cameras

Reviewers running multi-site retail and enterprise estates flag a practical ceiling past roughly 1,000 cameras. Integrators on the IPVM forums put the upper edge of a typical job at a 500-camera trial install. Forensic search is the first thing they see strain: Rhombus shines at K-12 incident response and slows on multi-thousand-camera evidence retrieval.

AT A GLANCE

Rhombus and TetherX, question by question

The 7 questions an integrator asks on a site walk, answered for both platforms.

Question Rhombus TetherX
What you do with the recorders already on site Displaced. Rhombus cameras record to on-camera storage and the Rhombus cloud. Rhombus Relay bridges an existing ONVIF or RTSP camera in, but an existing NVR or DVR has no place in the design. They stay. The TetherBox sits alongside the existing NVRs, DVRs and panels and pulls from them. It runs as software on a server the site already owns, so nobody rips out working kit to start.
Which devices you can connect Full features require Rhombus-branded cameras (R100 through R600). Bridged ONVIF and RTSP cameras run without the on-camera AI. 1,000+ integrations across 17,000+ device models, plus any ONVIF camera with full features - not a bridged, feature-reduced tier.
What your operators see on one timeline Cameras, environmental and vape sensors, access control and alarms all sit in the Rhombus Console. A genuinely unified stack, provided every part of it is Rhombus. Video, access control, intruder and automation. One operator, one timeline, one dashboard across all four.
What your uplink has to carry Rhombus publishes 10-30kbps per camera during regular operation - metadata, thumbnails and events go up constantly, full-resolution clips on demand. Thumbnails, metadata, and the clips an operator opens or chooses to sync. A thin rural line still records every camera, because recording never leaves the local network.
Where the AI runs On-camera edge AI that runs only on Rhombus-branded cameras, plus ChatGPT-powered "Insights" search added in 2025. At the edge on the TetherBox: person, vehicle and animal detection plus 63-class audio analytics, searchable across multi-site footage in seconds. The platform keeps evolving with additional analytics through the year.
What you actually pay for Camera hardware plus an annual per-camera licence, around $149/year Professional or $199/year Enterprise, with separate annual fees for sensors and access doors. An annual subscription by channel count, from £100/site/year. Not per operator seat, not per analytic, and no concurrent-user cap.
What you keep if you stop paying The cameras stop working. IPVM groups Rhombus with Verkada and Meraki in its "Hostage as a Service" bucket - a lapsed licence takes the camera with it. The TetherBox keeps a local interface for live view and recent footage with no Internet and no subscription, so the site is never dark.

Rhombus column built from: Rhombus price sheet (November 2025), Rhombus cameras FAQ (upload bandwidth), Rhombus support: recording during a network disconnection, Rhombus Systems on LinkedIn.

RHOMBUS vs TETHERX

K-12-polished closed ecosystem vs open multi-vertical.

Both channel-friendly multi-system cloud platforms. The honest read on where each one wins and where each one costs you something.

Rhombus

Strengths

Polished single-vendor stack - cameras, vape sensors, access control and alarms designed together

On-camera edge AI and ChatGPT-powered "Insights" search

Published price sheet with stability through the 2026 vendor price-hike window

Trade-offs

Camera lock-in - full features require Rhombus-branded cameras; bridged ONVIF cameras lose the on-camera AI

Annual per-camera licence (around $149-199/yr) on top of hardware - cameras stop working if it lapses

TetherX

Strengths

Open to 1,000+ integrations + any ONVIF device with full features - cameras already on site stay

Cloud recording optional per camera - local-only, cloud-only or both, all in one platform

Each site records to its own TetherBox, so growth adds boxes instead of loading one server

Trade-offs

You are a school and you want vape sensors, a lockdown workflow and cameras in one off-the-shelf console. Rhombus is the simpler buy.

WHICH ONE FITS

Pick the one your site points at

Find the column that describes the job in front of you.

Choose Rhombus if

  • You are fitting out a school and want vape sensors, lockdown workflow, access control and cameras as one packaged console, from one vendor, with one support number
  • The site has no cameras worth keeping, so buying the camera and the platform together costs you nothing in stranded hardware
  • You want a published price sheet you can put straight into a budget submission without a quote cycle
  • The estate is under a thousand cameras and unlikely to grow past it

Choose TetherX if

  • The customer already runs cameras, recorders or door controllers worth keeping, and replacing them is not in the budget
  • The site needs video, access control and intruder answered by one operator on one timeline, across mixed vendors
  • You want cloud recording on some cameras and local-only on the rest, decided camera by camera rather than for the whole site
  • You are running hundreds of sites, or the customer is in the UK, EU or Australia and wants data residency and support in their own working hours
FAQ

Questions before you switch from Rhombus

Rhombus (legally Rhombus Systems) is American - Sacramento, California, founded 2016, CEO Garrett Larsson. Venture-backed and independent with around $84M total funding including a US$45M Series C led by NightDragon in July 2024. It acquired cloud-cost startup Dashdive in February 2025 and signed a Honeywell reseller and integration deal in March 2026 - still independent, but increasingly channel-tethered to Honeywell.

The product is polished and genuinely strong in K-12, healthcare, multi-site retail and self-storage. Buyers leave for one reason: they want the next ten years of camera purchases to stay their own decision. The at-a-glance table above sets out what that costs on each side.

The at-a-glance table covers the licence. The part it does not carry is the hardware you buy first: reseller pages list the R400 4K varifocal dome at around $1,328, the R500 bullet around $1,648, and the R600 multi-sensor 4x5MP between $3,299 and $4,299. Those figures come from resellers (SHI, LTT Partners) and IPVM rather than from Rhombus, which does not publish list hardware prices.

On the TetherX side there is no camera to buy, because the cameras on site already count. You pay the subscription by channel count through your installer, and add cloud recording and AI per camera where a site needs them. Across the typical 1-200 camera range that lands well below an equivalent hardware-plus-licence stack, because nothing recurs per camera on the platform itself.

Vape and smoke detection in Rhombus runs on their proprietary A1 sensor, paired with their cameras, lockdown workflow and alarms in one console. That bundled K-12 stack is a genuine strength and the buyer-fit block above says so plainly.

TetherX gets you there differently: the TetherBox takes the vape sensor, the door controllers and the cameras as separate purchases on one timeline, so a school can fit sensors from whoever makes the best one this year and change that decision in five years without touching the cameras.

Where it runs, not what it finds. Rhombus shipped ChatGPT-powered "Insights" search in 2025, and IPVM tested it that November and found it a useful tool rather than magic. It sits on camera-side edge AI, which is why it only runs on Rhombus-branded cameras: change the camera and you change the analytics.

TetherX AI runs on the TetherBox instead of on the camera, so the same detection works on a camera bought in 2018 and one bought next year, and a site can mix brands without splitting its search into two. The table above lists what it detects.

Yes. Each site records to its own TetherBox and reports into one organisation, so growth adds boxes rather than loading a single server. An operator sees every site on one dashboard, with the per-site timelines underneath. That is the architecture, not a roadmap item.

A school with four buildings and a chain with four hundred stores run the same way. On the Rhombus side, the ceiling described above is the thing to size against before you commit a district or a chain.

Yes. 30 days free trial through an integrator partner, TetherBox included, full platform access. Extensions on request.
COMPANY HISTORY

Rhombus: independent, channel-led, increasingly Honeywell-tethered

Rhombus Systems was founded in Sacramento, California in 2016. CEO Garrett Larsson. Venture-backed, approximately $84M total funding including a US$45M Series C led by NightDragon on 30 July 2024. Still independent.

The product is the same closed-ecosystem, per-camera-licence, cloud-managed model as Verkada - cameras + sensors + access control + alarms + analytics, all managed in the Rhombus Console. The differentiator is that Rhombus sells through partners rather than around them. Same IPVM "Hostage as a Service" critique applies; just delivered with less direct-sales friction.

Two notable channel events: 27 February 2025 - Rhombus acquired Dashdive, a cloud-cost-management startup. 26 March 2026 - Rhombus signed a reseller / integration deal with Honeywell. Still independent, but increasingly channel-tethered to Honeywell. The price sheet PDF (latest revision November 2025) is published at rhombus.com/files/rhombus-price-sheet.pdf - one of the most transparent VSaaS pricing publications in the category alongside Videoloft.

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Across the partner network

TetherX partners hold the accreditations security-procurement buyers and insurers filter on. Coverage varies by partner.

NSI 9 ISO 9001 7 SSAIB 5 SafeContractor 5 BAFE 4 CHAS 4 ConstructionLine 4 Cyber Essentials 3 NICEIC 2 ISO 14001 2 ISO 27001 1

Counts reflect partners currently in the TetherX directory holding each accreditation.

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[1] About this comparison. Information about other vendors is drawn from their public product pages, datasheets, integrator forums (Reddit, vendor user groups), public CVE databases (NVD, CISA), publicly-listed LinkedIn company pages (headcount, headquarters, founding year, leadership transitions and corporate ownership signals) and customer conversations - accurate to the best of our knowledge as of Q2 2026. Pricing, features, security posture and policies change. A vendor may have shipped a fix, dropped a price, added a region or changed an architecture since this page was last reviewed.

If you believe anything here is inaccurate or out of date, please contact us and we will review and correct it. Trademarks and product names belong to their respective owners and are referenced here for identification only.

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