The best people counters for retail (2026)

The closest alternative to Dor is SMS Storetraffic’s PEARL, because those two are the only cloud-connected systems here that a single store can install with no cable reaching the door and no contractor booked.

Dor is genuinely good at what it does: a long-life battery, an optional cellular connection for sites with no usable network, a peel-and-stick install measured in minutes, and an official app in the Shopify App Store — which means Shopify itself reviewed the integration rather than Dor simply claiming it. You can buy one online by card, which most vendors in this comparison do not offer.

What sends people looking is the five-year bill: Dor is $300 for the sensor (plus shipping) and $135 per location per month on annual billing, reaching $8,400 over five years for one door.

If you cannot run a cable to your entrance, the comparison is PEARL: $499.95 with a software plan that can stay at $0 indefinitely, which comes to $525 over five years. Cheaper to start with Dor, 3.3× more expensive to own against our full Retail plan.

If you can run a cable, the arithmetic gets stranger: a 3D Scope II LC on our Retail plan — a stereoscopic sensor that separates people in groups, filters staff and carries a written 95% accuracy floor — costs $2,533 over three years including $275 for the cable run, against Dor’s $5,160 (plus shipping) for the same period. Roughly half the price, for a sensor that does considerably more.

The POS ledger tilts the same way: we name ten supported POS systems publicly (see integrations) against Dor’s four. And our Retail plan produces conversion rate without any POS connection at all, using a retail simulator, for shops whose till is not on the list or who would rather not connect it.

One more thing: Dor publishes no accuracy percentage — its position is that accuracy figures do not meaningfully separate reputable vendors, which is a reasonable argument, but it does mean there is no number to hold them to, where SenSource, RetailNext and SMS Storetraffic all publish a guaranteed floor. And Dor sells one sensor on one plan, so there is no second model to move to if your requirements change.

Less than most people assume, and it depends entirely on the technology. We can answer for ours.

Our 3D Scope II LC is not a camera in the way the word usually means. It mounts directly above the doorway with a top-down field of view, so it is not positioned to capture faces at a usable angle, and it runs at counting resolution rather than surveillance resolution. That is geometry, not policy.

Recording is off by default. It has to be activated and scheduled. The sensor can also stream live video to a system of your own — a small number of customers do that, and if you do, the footage and the obligations that come with it are yours. In normal operation the sensor builds a depth map, counts, and sends a number.

Here is what it records about a person. An adult walks in: adult, in, +1. A child walks out: child, out, +1. A staff member, if you use the staff tag: staff, +1. That, with a timestamp and the sensor it happened at, is the whole record in normal operation. Adults and children are told apart by shape and height, never by anything about a face.

When recording is activated and scheduled, it is so you can verify our count yourself — which is rather the point. You should not have to take an accuracy figure on trust. If we review an audit video, we keep it no longer than 90 days. Notice to the people in your store is your responsibility, as with any recording device on your premises.

We do not estimate age brackets or gender from facial or body features — the 3D Scope’s adult/child split is a height threshold, not a profile. A sensor that infers attributes about an individual raises a different legal question from one that counts events, and that is worth putting to your legal team rather than taking from a vendor’s website.

If privacy is your first criterion rather than your third, the answer is not a 3D sensor at all — it is PEARL. A break beam registers that something crossed a line. It captures even less than thermal — no image, no heat map, no shape.

For an enterprise retailer running hundreds of doors, especially across several countries, the honest answer is that ShopperTrak and RetailNext are the main alternatives to each other. Both are built for that scale, and both publish an industry benchmark index that tells you how your traffic compares with the wider market rather than only with your own history.

Both also sell security alongside analytics, which matters more than it sounds. RetailNext has a video security product and an asset protection platform; Sensormatic runs Shrink Analyzer under the same brand as ShopperTrak. At this scale the traffic counter and the loss prevention system are frequently combined, and that is a reason to choose one of them that has nothing to do with counting.

Below them on scale sit V-Count and SenSource. V-Count and Sensormatic both offer anonymous demographic estimation, but V-Count is the only one publishing an accuracy figure for it — 95% for gender, 80% for age — and its pricing improves with volume, which it also publishes openly. SenSource has a guaranteed accuracy floor and a strong institutional track record.

If you are buying at this scale you will almost certainly run an RFP, which is the right way to compare vendors who mostly do not publish prices. Ask every one of them for a five-year landed figure including installation, cabling and site surveys — that is where these quotes differ most, and it is the number least likely to appear in the first proposal.

For one store with a standard entrance — or a growing SMB retailer — the practical shortlist is two vendors: of the cloud-connected systems here, theirs are the only ones that need no cable run to the door and no contractor: our PEARL ($499.95, free Lite software plan, standard AA batteries) and Dor ($300 plus $150 per location per month, two-year battery, your store’s Wi-Fi).

From there the comparison tilts our way on three things.

Range: Dor sells one sensor model, mounted on the doorframe — its help centre cites “height, width, and traffic requirements” and lists roll gates, automatic door motors and sliding-door sensors as obstructions to email support about — and publishes no alternative model, so a location it cannot fit needs a second provider. We cover those doors with the 3D Scope II on the same platform.

Upgrade path: a PEARL store that outgrows it moves to the 3D Scope II without changing software, dashboards or history.

Cost: five years on our full Retail plan is $2,572 per door against Dor’s $8,400 plus shipping — 3.3× — and on the free Lite plan it is $525.

Everything else here needs a cable run, a sales conversation, or both.

Hardware runs from $299 to $1,650 per sensor (the top end is our outdoor 3D Scope), and software from $0 to roughly $150 per location per month. Our PEARL starts at $499.95 with a free Lite software plan; the 3D Scope II LC at $1,149.95. Dor charges $300 plus $150 per location monthly; V-Count $299–799 plus $9–49 monthly; RetailNext’s calculator estimates $146 per store per month. Sensormatic, SenSource and Traf-Sys publish no figures.

Our Lite plan costs $0 per month with no time limit and no credit card — hourly in/out counts, four weeks of history, alerts and multi-location support. You still buy the sensor. It is the only free software tier among the nine systems with no paid year and no mandatory support contract.

Published claims cluster between 95% and 99.96%, but a floor and a ceiling are opposite promises. Three vendors offer a contractual guarantee or written floor: SenSource 98%, RetailNext 95% after install, and we back the 3D Scope II LC at a 95% minimum for two years — 98% typical, with a video audit on request. FootfallCam publishes condition-based ranges (99.5%+ in normal conditions) rather than a guarantee. Dor publishes no percentage at all — its comparison page argues the numbers are not comparable (“methodologies vary: door type, traffic volume, group-entry handling, and bidirectional logic all move the number”) and instead asserts that thermal counters like Dor “perform in the same range as stereo-vision and AI-video counters from the same buying tier”. Everyone else says “up to”. Ask any vendor for the minimum they will stand behind, not the maximum they have seen.

Depends on the sensor. Of the cloud-connected systems compared, PEARL and Dor need no cable at all — PEARL runs on AA batteries over Wi-Fi, Dor on a two-year battery over your store’s Wi-Fi (a $300 cellular base station is optional). Every 3D stereo sensor in this comparison is powered over Ethernet and needs one run to the door. V-Count’s Nano is battery-free, so it needs USB-C or PoE power either way.

Battery sensors genuinely take minutes — PEARL and Dor are both peel-and-stick. Cabled sensors take as long as the cable run, which is the part quoted install times leave out. RetailNext states a four-to-six-week deployment for a full rollout; FootfallCam schedules professional installs about two weeks ahead. Ask whether the vendor’s figure includes getting power to the door.

We name ten systems publicly — Lightspeed R and X-Series, Shopify, Square, Heartland Retail, Erply, KWI, Retail Pro (beta), Furniture Wizard and Storeforce (see integrations). V-Count and Dor name four each; the other five vendors name none. Our Retail plan can also produce conversion rate without any POS connection, using a retail simulator.

Three of the eight vendors — SMS Storetraffic, Dor and FootfallCam — let you buy online without talking to sales. We take card payment on site and through our official Amazon listings in the US and Canada. Dor’s checkout is a five-step self-serve flow with payment taken online (adding a location to an existing account goes through Dor staff approval). FootfallCam’s one-product shop takes a card but their own “Buy Now” path does not link to it — and their terms make a support contract with no published price mandatory from day one, so only two vendors show you the full price and let you buy online. The remaining five — RetailNext, Sensormatic (ShopperTrak), SenSource, Traf-Sys and V-Count — sell only through a quote or demo request, even where they publish prices.

For one entrance at published prices: PEARL is $525 over five years on the free plan, or $2,572 with the full Retail analytics plan ($449.95 hardware with a 1-year plan). Dor is $8,400 plus shipping. RetailNext’s calculator estimates $146 per store per month — $5,256 over three years and $8,760 over five, before installation and cabling. V-Count’s published floor works out near $1,114 over five years, though its exact total cannot be computed from the published tiers. FootfallCam’s mandatory support contract has no published price, so its cost cannot be totalled at all — and three of the eight vendors publish no price at all. Note the inversion: Dor is cheaper than PEARL to buy and 3.3× more expensive to own.