Can you use a TP-Link Tapo camera for daycare parent viewing?

Tapo (TP-Link's smart-home line) supports RTSP and ONVIF on its plug-in indoor and outdoor cameras: you create a camera account in the Tapo app, and the camera serves a standard local stream any professional system can pull. At roughly $25–50 per camera, it's the cheapest option that works.

Because Tapo cameras are WiFi with a plug-in power adapter, they're an option in a home daycare where a room genuinely can't be wired: no ethernet runs, no PoE switch, just a wall outlet. But wired PoE (Anpviz/Reolink) is what we recommend by default: it's more reliable day to day and simpler for us to support.

Three setup quirks worth knowing if you do go with Tapo. RTSP isn't on by default: you have to add a dedicated camera account in the Tapo app before the stream is reachable, an extra step compared to brands that expose RTSP out of the box. There's no separate low-resolution sub-stream to pull, only the full 1080p feed, so bandwidth planning should assume 1080p per camera, that's fine for 1–2 cameras, but plan for a stronger access point or wired backhaul with several running on WiFi at once. And audio can't be stripped from the RTSP stream itself: CareCam's parent stream is video-only by design, so on Tapo you mute the microphone in the Tapo app rather than disabling audio per stream.