Every bird enthusiast has probably heard of Birdfy and Birdbuddy smart bird feeders, but a handful of competitors have quietly been refining their models over multiple generations—to the point where they’re starting to outpace the OGs in engineering, features, and design. Kiwibit is one of them.

I tested the Feeder 2 Pro for a total of four weeks: one week at the non-subscription tier, and three weeks with Kiwibit Plus (also alternately referred to as “Family Premium” or “Premium Family”), which at $90 a year offers AI ID, 60-day cloud recording (the feeder also supports microSD storage up to 512 GB), and new gallery views and roundup reports.

Without a subscription, camera quality is the same (some other feeder brands, like Birdbuddy, will paywall higher resolution), but here you’re limited to a bare-bones feed of video captures, and there’s no AI ID to sort or identify them—you’ll have to look at every image to make sure you didn’t miss anything interesting. This can be especially laborious if the same bird visits 15 times or more per day, especially since the camera placement means the thumbnails often show only the top of the bird’s head, if they show anything. This is atypical for a feeder with an MSRP of $290—most models at this price point include a lifetime subscription.

The subscription gives you the same feed of video captures, but with labels of the bird species so you can skip past the ones that aren’t worth opening. There’s also a tile view under “Visits” that shows which birds have visited over the feeder’s lifetime and when they were last seen. However, this is only so useful given that the AI ID is wrong a hefty percentage of the time—fish crows, Cape May warblers, mangrove warblers, red fox sparrows, and grackles are not found in western Washington state, where I live, but according to the Kiwibit app they are frequent visitors to my backyard. (I even had a “pileated woodpecker” visit the feeder, which would have been exceptionally rare, except the misidentified bird was a crow.)

One area where Birdfy and Birdbuddy still beat their competitors is their intuitive, user-friendly apps. While Kiwibit’s non-subscription view has a simple interface, the subscription experience is a bit chaotic, as Kiwibit tries to cram a lot of information into too many places. There’s the tile view under “Birds,” the list of captures under “Feeds,” and a live view under “Live,” which you can click into to see a calendar of captures by day. Then, under “Me,” there’s a different calendar view with the number of bird visits per day, and a weekly Report tab that gives stats on that week’s visits. Even after four weeks of testing, I’m still not sure where I should first look when I simply want to see the birds that visited that day.