The question isn't which one is objectively better — it's where you want the risk to live: a box on your wall that can be stolen, or a subscription that depends on your uplink staying up.
Every IP camera has to send its video somewhere to be stored and reviewed later. An on-premises NVR keeps that entire job local — the recorder sits in a rack or closet on-site, storing and processing video on its own hard drives, with no dependency on an internet connection to keep recording. Cloud storage — Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS)— moves that same job off-site: the camera streams its video out over the internet to a provider's data center, which stores and often processes it there, and the customer pays an ongoing subscription instead of buying recorder hardware. Neither one is a strict upgrade of the other. They trade a fixed, one-time capital cost and full on-site control for a recurring subscription and offsite resilience — and which trade is right depends heavily on camera count, retention length, and how much bandwidth the site can spare.
Both architectures ultimately do the same job — capture video, store it, make it reviewable — so the decision isn't really about capability. It's about which failure mode you're more willing to accept. An on-prem NVR puts all the footage in one physical box inside the building it's protecting: rock-solid against an internet outage, but a single point of failure against theft, fire, or physical destruction of that box, unless it's paired with a genuine offsite backup. VSaaS moves the footage off-site as it's captured, which is exactly why it survives an on-site disaster — but it inherits a different single point of failure, the site's internet uplink, because recording itself (not just remote viewing) now depends on that connection staying up and having enough sustained bandwidth for every camera's stream. Neither trade-off is wrong. Picking the one that matches the site's actual risk profile — internet reliability, physical security of the recorder location, and how much a gap in coverage would cost — is the entire design decision.
Not always — it depends heavily on camera count and retention requirements. VSaaS subscriptions scale roughly linearly: double the cameras or double the retention days, and the monthly bill roughly doubles too, which is exactly why a large deployment with long retention (say, 90+ days across 100 cameras) tends to get expensive fast on a per-camera subscription model, often crossing over the cost of a well-sized NVR within a couple of years. But that comparison flips for a small site: a five-camera installation with modest retention needs may find a cloud subscription cheaper than the alternative once the NVR's true total cost of ownership is counted — the hardware purchase, the RAID drives, eventual drive failures, a recorder refresh every five to seven years, and the IT time spent maintaining and patching an on-site device. There is no universal answer; the crossover point depends on camera count, retention length, drive costs at the time of purchase, and how many years the comparison is run over.