Garage door openers are making their way into smart homes in a big way.

The garage is no longer just a shed. From delivery in the garage to smart locks and openers, your car home is as smart as your home. LiftMaster Secure View (87504) combines the Wi-Fi garage door connection with the built-in camera to form an all-round system that provides you with remote access and monitoring. 

This garage door opener costs $468, which is more expensive than many models you will find at your local home improvement store. However, the quiet belt drive, useful applications and feature-rich design make it worth considering. 

If you are interested in additional intelligence, we have collected the best accessories to make your existing garage door opener smarter. 

The most notable feature of LiftMaster Secure View is the built-in camera. The camera hangs on the bottom of the bottle opener and can be retracted or manually rotated 360 degrees to point exactly where you want to monitor activity and stream 1080p real-time video.

Our two-door setup requires two door openers, that is, two cameras. We can easily separate each camera 180 degrees and view almost the entire garage in the MyQ app. The camera includes two-way audio from the bottom speaker and has black and white night vision. 

Another feature that makes the design of this bottle opener unique is the 360-degree LED ring. You will get 2,000 lumens of light to illuminate your space, and the 360-degree design will not leave any corners in the shadows. 

The 2,000 lumens LED ring light provides plenty of light for the dark garage.

In addition to lights and cameras, LiftMaster Secure View runs on a very quiet belt drive system. Belt drives are an excellent choice for families with additional garage space. They are much quieter than chain drive systems when opening and closing. Our device is also equipped with wall buttons and keyboard.  

Our LiftMaster units are installed by local authorized dealers. If you want, you can install the opener yourself. We had to replace the chain drive system for the belt drive of the new device and chose to do this professionally. After installing the equipment, we programmed the attached wall buttons and keyboard. 

Read more: MyQ pet portal is a smart puppy door

LiftMaster Secure View connects to your smart home through your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network. The wall button is also where you set up the smart functions of this opener. You will first open the MyQ app and add the device.

From there, the MyQ app will guide you to the wall button menu and quickly guide you through the setup. My device connects to my Wi-Fi and MyQ app within 10 minutes. I do have to perform a firmware update for the camera, but it is as simple as putting my phone in the Bluetooth range of the opener for a few minutes.

The camera under the corkscrew can be lowered or retracted.

The MyQ application is well-built and easy to navigate. We have previously recommended other products that support MyQ (Chamberlain and LiftMaster are sister companies and both use the MyQ platform). Operations such as viewing cameras, opening and closing doors, setting schedules, and sharing user access permissions are all simple and relaxing experiences.

What MyQ lacks is true integration with other smart home platforms. Yes, you can connect the MyQ app to Google Assistant, but not the Google Home app. Amazon Key integration for Prime members supports in-garage delivery, but there is no direct way to connect your MyQ opener to the Alexa app. HomeKit compatibility does not exist, unless you purchase the MyQ HomeKit Bridge accessory (another $70). 

IFTTT provides some workarounds for Alexa, but MyQ feels far behind compared to the hundreds of lesser-known and possibly less-funded apps that work with these platforms. The app itself is great, but if it utilizes the full potential of Google Home and Alexa integration, it could be even better.

It is true that I have a MyQ product in my garage, but I still find that I am using a physical wall button or a remote control in the car instead of an app control. For me, the best part of the voice assistant integration is that you can ask the Google Assistant whether the garage door is closed. If it is not, I can ask Google Assistant to turn it off. 

I should note that you can also connect MyQ-enabled openers with Vivint, Ring, Alarm.com to integrate into your preferred security system. I tested the Ring integration, which allows me to view the status of the garage door and launch the MyQ app from the Ring app’s dashboard. 

The MyQ app is where you interact most of the remote control with the garage door. I did notice that for each of my built-in cameras, there would be quite a bit of startup delay when opening the app, and there would be some intermittent feeds when operating the garage door. Except for some minor issues in the synopsis, the video is almost always clear, and the two-way audio works well. 

The wall button serves as the physical control center for the corkscrew. 

As I mentioned before, the belt drive is quiet and runs smoothly. Unlike some of the additional corkscrew cameras we have tested, this camera has no jittery video source. The vision looks clear both day and night, and I appreciate the option of taking feed photos from the app.

Setting up notifications for door activities and alarms is also easy. You can set up separate notifications for the camera and the door, so that you can choose to monitor only the movement detected by the camera or only the movement of the garage door, or both. 

A spare battery is on board in case your garage is out of power. If your Wi-Fi is not working properly, the physical buttons and keyboard on the wall can provide backup. 

The LiftMaster safety view worked well in my tests. The belt drive is very quiet. The setup is simple and the advertised function works well. When looking at the camera input, I did experience some delays in the app, but I did not get some unstable input from the after-sale garage camera. 

The MyQ app still has some limitations, but it gains the basics of remote operation, shared access, and schedule creation. Priced at $468, as a dealer-only product, LiftMaster Secure View is not as easy to use as Chamberlain's similar models. However, if you buy through a dealer, perhaps during renovation or garage construction, I can confidently recommend this LiftMaster option.