Kiwibit sells a few different versions of the Beako; all use the same camera and app (available on both Android and iOS), but solar power and bundled subscription options vary.
The Beako works without a subscription, but only saves the past 24 hours of video on the cloud, limits videos to a maximum 20 seconds, and doesn’t tag birds by species. If you don’t mind using a microSD card, it’s an economical option, though going through all the videos manually takes some time. That said, if you have a slow internet connection or simply don’t want to pay for a subscription, the memory card option is welcome, and something you don’t get with our other top-rated feeders like the Birdfy 2 Pro or Bird Buddy Pro.
Adding a subscription is a good idea if you prefer cloud storage to microSD. Kiwibit’s paid service extends cloud storage to 60 days or 30GB of video (whichever comes first) on a rolling basis, adds automated species identification and tagging, increases the maximum record time to 3 minutes, and pulls still images of visitors to populate the in-app bird book. The Kiwbit service costs $4.99 monthly or $47.49 annually for a single device, and $9.99 monthly or $105.99 annually for unlimited feeders.
I reviewed the $279.99 Beako With Solar Roof, which has 4.4W solar built into its roof panels to extend the time between charges. The Beako is also available with an external 3W USB-C solar panel for $269.99, a pay-as-you-go subscription, or a lifetime subscription for $299.99. Take these prices with a grain of salt, because the Beako is frequently sold below its list price, as is the case for most smart feeders. At the time of publication, the solar roof version is $219.99, and the external solar version is $189.99 with a pay-as-you-go subscription, and $279.99 with a lifetime plan. There’s no option to get the solar roof and lifetime subscription together at this time.
(Credit: Jim Fisher)
To compare, the Birdfy 2 Pro is available for purchase with a pay-as-you-go or lifetime bird identification subscription ($4.99 monthly, $49 annually, $69.99 lifetime) and includes 5GB of lifetime storage, 30 days of 20-second clips, and 5GB to save your favorites indefinitely. You can buy more storage a la carte (20GB is $1.99 monthly/$19.90 annually, 80GB is $3.99/$39.90, and 200GB is $5.99/$59.90), or upgrade your video plan to record 30 seconds at a time ($1.99/$19.90 for one device, $2.99/$29.90 for two) or extend rolling storage to 60 days ($5.99/$59.90 for up to five devices, $8.99/$89.90 for up to 10). Birdfy offers a wide range of backyard bird tech, including nesting boxes, a bird bath, and hummingbird feeders, which explains why it has so many tiers and pricing options. Meanwhile, Bird Buddy keeps things a little simpler and doesn’t require a subscription for species recognition. Bird Buddy has a Premium tier ($69.99 individual, $98.99 family annually) that gets you higher-quality 2K video, among other sundry features, but it’s fully equipped without a monthly fee.
It’s pretty easy to get the Beako up and running. Download the Kiwibit app from the Apple App Store or Google Play, and it will guide you through connecting the feeder to your home Wi-Fi network—it takes only a couple of minutes. Like many smart home devices, the feeder only works with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, so you’ll want to make sure that frequency is enabled. I had no issues connecting it to my dual-band eero 6+ mesh network. On a typical day with three-minute videos enabled, the Kiwibit sent about 2.8GB of video to the cloud. Not every clip is full-length (the Kiwibit cuts off the video once a bird flies away), so you can shorten the clip if you don’t want to fill up the 30GB cap too quickly. I’d suggest setting the upper limit to 30 seconds or a minute per clip.
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The app is organized into four tabs: Home, Birds, Activity, and Account (Credit: Kiwibit/PCMag)
The app itself is broken up into four main pages: Home, Birds, Activity, and Account. Home shows a list of Kiwibit feeders (in case you have more than one set up), and lets you pop into the camera to take a live look any time. This is where you’ll go to change camera settings, too. I left most of the default settings, but made a point to disable time/date watermarks (Video Settings > Watermark), extend the clip duration from the default 10 seconds (Motion Detection > Recording Setting), and enable the feeder’s automatic nuisance animal alarm (which sounds a klaxon whenever a squirrel stops by). The latter isn’t really effective with my squirrels, as they learned to ignore it after a couple of days, but they have to eat, too.
The app lets you change camera and motion detection settings, and set up an alarm to scare squirrels away (Credit: Kiwibit/PCMag)
The Birds page is a record of every species that’s visited your feeder. Its gallery shows thumbnails of each species, along with the number of visits. Tap on any bird to see a record of all visits, and tap any of those entries to play the recorded video, assuming it hasn’t yet scrolled off your account. If you don’t have a subscription, videos and photos expire after 24 hours, but subscribers can look back up to 60 days.
I like that the Bird page is automatically populated, but I am disappointed by the hit-or-miss image quality—the Beako pulls out still frames from the camera’s video clips and crops in heavily to get a close-up view of birds. Sometimes it gets a good thumbnail; other times, it picks one with poor lighting or a bad pose, and there’s no way to change it. All and all, I find the Beako’s still images underwhelming, though to be fair, the feeder and app are more focused on video.
If the app gets a bird species wrong you can change the tag manually (Credit: Kiwibit/PCMag)
The Activity tab shows a list of every visitor in a daily calendar view. You can scroll back to any day you’d like (within the 60-day window) and view clips. There are buttons to filter out by species, and this is also where you’ll go to fix tags on any birds that the feeder misidentifies. The Beako does a decent, but not spectacular, job tagging species. It’s most accurate when the light is good, and the bird isn’t backlit, but struggles if the sun is in the background, creating flare, or on overcast days when the light is dull enough to keep its camera from getting a good look at the colors and patterns of plumage.
In these instances, the feeder will most often leave a bird listed as unidentified, and occasionally will make an incorrect, wild guess as to the species. I saw a few female house finches tagged as California towhees (a bird that does not venture into Pennsylvania, where I live) and noted a red-winged blackbird that was identified as a raven (a bird that’s many times larger), for instance. I am a little surprised at how many times it left house finches (one of my most frequent visitors) unidentified. I also noticed that the Kiwibit only ever tagged a single species per clip, even if a couple of different types of birds are stopping by simultaneously or in sequence. I caught a house sparrow dining next to a house finch in one clip where only the finch was tagged. Another time, when a finch swept in to scare away a black-capped chickadee, the latter was the only tag. Bird Buddy and Birdfy do a better job in this scenario.
(Credit: Jim Fisher)
You can go into any visit to add or fix a tag, but if you’re new to birding and don’t know a sparrow from a wren, you’ll benefit more from the Bird Buddy Pro, which has the best species identification I’ve seen, or the Birdfy Feeder Pro 2, which is in between the Bird Buddy and Beako in accuracy. Still, the Beako gets the species right more often that not, which I can’t say about budget-priced feeders like the Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder or the Detiko Bamboo Feeder that I’m currently evaluating.
The Account tab rounds out the app pages. From here you can manage your subscription and devices, change the language, access online documentation the like.
One note, I’ve tested the Kiwibit on and off for several months, starting with the non-solar version last spring before switching out to the solar roof edition in late November 2025. Over that time, I’ve seen marked improvement in its app. Useful features like manual species tagging and watermark removal were added after launch. Updates and bug fixes come out a few times a month, so it’s clear to me that the Kiwibit team is working to refine and improve Beako, and I have some hope that my gripes about species identification will be made irrelevant over time.
