Ackerman Home Security Review

Shopping locally is a great way to support small businesses, but when it comes to home security, using a local provider may not always be your smartest move. While the East Coast company Ackerman Security has a lot of the same positive traits as bigger national security companies, it falls short when it comes to customer service—and you might have a tough time getting out of your contract if you move out of Ackerman’s limited service area.

Tip: If you're curious to see how we ranked the best national home security providers, you can check out our best home security systems guide.

Ackerman’s packages start at around $99 for the basics, but anything beyond that will be between you and your sales rep. There is an undisclosed installation fee that many customers say they didn’t know about until they were billed for it, so be sure to ask about it up front. You can’t self-monitor your system, but monthly monitoring is only about $20, and it includes mobile access to your system through the highly rated Alarm.com app.

You have to sign a contract with Ackerman in order to receive services, and keep in mind that because Ackerman doesn’t cover the whole country, you may have issues if you have to move outside the company’s service area. Customers say that Ackerman has continued to charge them for monitoring even after they moved and that cancelling the contract requires a lot of snail-mail hassle and red tape.

Ackerman doesn’t disclose information about warranties or money-back guarantees, but it does guarantee that if your home is burglarized while it’s being protected by an Ackerman system, the company will reimburse you for 200% of your total losses.

Ackerman uses Honeywell equipment, which is a well-known security industry standard. The basic package comes with wireless door and window sensors, a motion sensor, and a wireless keypad. You can add on additional devices like video cameras and flood sensors for more security, and lighting modules and other smart devices for home automation. You can also connect your system and smart devices to your Amazon Alexa for voice control. Even basic systems come with remote smartphone access through the Alarm.com app, and Ackerman also offers medical monitoring through a First Alert emergency pendant.

If the installation process goes smoothly, you’ll probably enjoy your experience with Ackerman. But if there are any problems—like common glitches with equipment or compatibility issues—then you might be facing an uphill battle. Through researching customer reviews, we learned that Ackerman’s customer service is a lot like the old poem about the girl with the curl: when they’re good, they’re very, very good, but when they’re bad, they’re horrid.

Customers with system issues complained of being shuffled through various levels of unhelpful customer service. Some reviewers said they were stuck paying for a nonworking security system as they tried and failed (sometimes for months) to get Ackerman to resolve the issue.

Ackerman Security started in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967, and it’s been steadily growing ever since. It’s still not a large company, though—it serves customers only in the metro areas of Atlanta, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. But despite being a regional security provider, it installs equipment by leading security manufacturers like Honeywell and Yale, the same brand names also used by major national security companies like ADT.

Because Ackerman is a regional company, it has only one monitoring center, with no backups. Ackerman requires professional installation of its systems, and you won’t find much information about equipment and pricing online. When we called to find out more, we were told that we couldn’t get any pricing information until a sales rep came out to the house for a home security consultation.

If you live in the Ackerman service area, you’re planning to live there long term, and you have friends and neighbors who have Ackerman Security and like it, then you might want to consider it as your home security provider. You’ll have quality equipment at an affordable price, and you’ll be able to expand your system to include home automation and medical monitoring. You’ll pay a lot less for basic monitoring than you would with a national brand, but you should be prepared to run into some potential issues if you ever need to work with Ackerman customer service.

We studied the Ackerman website and scoured the web to read more about customers’ experiences with the company. We spoke with company representatives and compared user reviews to find the most accurate information. Find out more about how we review products by checking out our methodology.

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