CathexisVision alternative
Both South African. Both run on Ubuntu. The differences are narrower than usual — and worth being precise about.
Cathexis has been building VMS software in Durban since before most of this industry existed. This page is not an argument that they are bad at it. It is an honest account of where Ividiyo is different, including the places where it is not.
Most of the arguments on our other comparison pages are irrelevant to this one. Against Milestone we talk about Windows Server; CathexisVision ships Ubuntu 20.04 and 24.04 server packages alongside its Windows build, so that is a draw. Against overseas vendors we talk about rand pricing and local support; Cathexis is a Durban company with a South African support team and thirty years of local installations behind it, so that is a draw too, and arguably better than a draw in their favour.
What is left is a smaller set of real differences: whether you can see the price before you talk to anyone, whether the analytics are inside the package price or beside it, whether there is a desktop client at all, and whether the product scales down to a Raspberry Pi and a free tier as well as up to a national estate.
This page is for people choosing between the two, and it sticks to what can be checked against each vendor's own published material.
Only what can be verified from each vendor's own published material. Cathexis does not publish prices or a text licensing model, so neither is characterised here.
| CathexisVision | Ividiyo | |
|---|---|---|
| Server operating system | Windows Server 2016 or later, or Ubuntu — 20.04 and 24.04 server packages are published for the current release. A genuine strength, and the same answer we give. | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, plus Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit on a Pi 4 or 5. No Windows build. |
| Operator client | A Windows client, with CATHEXISCarbon as the current generation — a Windows desktop installer, and CATHEXISCarbon Web, which runs in a browser with nothing to install. | A browser, and only a browser. There is no desktop client to install, version-match or license per seat, because everything an operator does is the same web interface. iOS and Android apps are included on every tier. |
| Published pricing | Prices are not published. Packages and the feature matrix are set out on the licensing page, and the figures come from Cathexis or an accredited partner. | Every tier and camera band is on the pricing page in rand, including VAT. Free, Home at R850 a year, the Professional bands, and Enterprise per recording server. |
| What a package includes | Features are set out per package, and the licensing page's own legend distinguishes an included feature from one where a licence is required, so some capability sits beside the package price rather than inside it. | Object detection, plate recognition, appearance search, heatmaps, video synopsis, anonymisation and face recognition are all inside Professional and Enterprise. There is no second line on the quote. |
| Smallest deployment | An enterprise and commercial product, sold through accredited integrators. | The same software runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 for a house or a smallholding, and the Free tier covers 10 cameras with no licence key and no expiry. |
| Scale | Around thirty years and a very large installed base across Africa and the Middle East, with an extensive published list of tested camera and third-party integrations behind it. | Built and priced for estates in the thousands: unlimited cameras per recording server, multi-server recording under one management interface, federated multi-site and automatic server failover. 500+ cameras on a single site, 10,000+ supported, and a worked cost example at 2,500 published on the Milestone comparison. |
CathexisVision details above are taken from Cathexis's own published download listings, documentation and licensing page as at October 2026. Their licensing page presents its package matrix as an image rather than text, so this table deliberately makes no claim about how their licences are counted — ask Cathexis or an accredited partner, and ask us the same question.
The clearest way to compare two products whose prices are presented differently is for one side to put its numbers down and invite the other to do the same. Ours are below, in full, for an estate of 2,500 cameras.
That 2,500-camera figure assumes AI detection on every single camera, at the 150-cameras-per-GPU density we run in production — it is the most expensive shape this can take, because the GPU is what sets the server count. Most estates of this size run detection on the cameras that need it rather than all of them, which means fewer servers for the same camera count. There is no CathexisVision column here for the same reason there is none in the table above: their package matrix is published as an image and their prices are not published at all, so anything we printed would be invented. Ask them for the equivalent figure and set it beside this one.
Our cluster costs R958,400 a year for 2,500 cameras with detection on every one of them, which works out at R383 per camera per year, with every AI module inside that number rather than beside it. That figure is arithmetic off a published price list, so you can check it before you speak to anybody, including us.
Put the same two questions to both vendors and the comparison answers itself. What does an estate of 2,500 cameras cost per year, all in, with analytics on the cameras that need them? And what does the next two hundred cameras cost after that? Our answers are R958,400, and nothing until a recording server runs out of capacity.
We are not claiming theirs is worse. We are claiming ours is knowable in advance, which at this size is worth something on its own.
Stripped of everything the two products have in common.
Our full price list is on the website in rand including VAT, so you can size a budget before you speak to anybody and check our arithmetic against a competing quote. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight — most of this industry quotes privately, and it makes comparison shopping slow.
Detection, plate recognition, appearance search, heatmaps and synopsis are in the Professional and Enterprise tiers rather than added to them. You still need a GPU or an accelerator to run them, but there is no per-channel analytics line and no decision about which cameras deserve AI.
The same build runs a ten-camera house on a Raspberry Pi and a multi-server estate, with a free tier at the bottom of it. A product aimed squarely at commercial installations has no reason to do that, and Cathexis does not pretend to.
Yes. It is built in Johannesburg by AD Infratech (Pty) Ltd and supported from here, with all prices published in rand including VAT. So the usual local-versus-imported argument does not apply between us and Cathexis — you are choosing between two South African products, which is a better position for a buyer than most markets offer.
It does. Cathexis publishes Ubuntu 20.04 and 24.04 server packages alongside a Windows Server build, so Linux is not a point of difference between us. Where we differ is the operator side: their client generation, CATHEXISCarbon, ships as a Windows desktop application with CATHEXISCarbon Web as the browser option, whereas we have no desktop client at all.
We will not characterise theirs, because Cathexis does not publish the model in a form we can quote — their licensing page carries the package matrix as an image, and its legend shows that some features are included in a package while others require a licence. Ask them directly. Ours is published in full: no per-camera licence at any tier, priced by site camera band on Professional and per recording server on Enterprise, with every AI module included.
Yes, if they speak ONVIF or RTSP, which covers virtually every IP camera of the last decade. The cameras, cabling, switches and storage all stay. Recorded video already written in CathexisVision's format stays in that system, so the usual approach is to keep the old recorder read-only until its retention expires.
You should not take it on faith. Everything on this page about CathexisVision comes from Cathexis's own published downloads, documentation and licensing page, and is worded so you can go and check it. Where we could not verify something — how their licences are counted — we have said so rather than guessed. Ask them the questions this page raises, and ask us the same ones.
The Free tier runs up to 10 cameras with live view, recording, playback and clip export — no licence key, no time limit, no card. Point it at the cameras you already own and see what it does before anything changes.
Need something to send on? Download the product brochure (PDF) — it carries this comparison and the pricing.