I built a UniFi network 6 or 7 years ago. I was pretty excited, as the hardware seemed properly solid. A touch expensive, but I was expecting it to run forever, essentially.
The hardware was actually really good from what I could tell. Not a single issue that wasn't caused by my own misconfiguration. But the software, woof. The software was designed to do exactly one thing: look impressive to execs in a board meeting. It was nearly unusable for me. I don't recall any specifics, but all you really need to know is that it took multiple days to get a simple home network with a single AP and a single router set up. It was so much effort just to log in to the damn thing.
I went into this project excited at the prospect of all the cool monitoring and analytics I could do. Fancy security and remote access and whatnot. After I finally got everything configured, I never touched it again. There were a few times when I needed or wanted to get into it, but I couldn't remember the specific incantation and combination of software needed to access it, so I just didn't.
I'd love to have a solid system built on quality hardware. UniFi is notionally exactly what I want, and exactly what a lot of hackers and tinkerers want. But the quality of your hardware is pretty much irrelevant if your software wasn't designed to be used by humans.
So I'm stuck using consumer routers with open firmware. It's fine I guess.
My situation is basically the other side of the same coin: I built out my network 7 years ago using Edge gear instead of UniFi.
The hardware is solid and the software isn't flashy but it's reliable. It's exactly what hackers and tinkerers want, so naturally Ubiquiti has all but abandoned the entire product line.
They haven't discontinued it (yet) so I could still replace any piece of it if I needed to but their software version history doesn't exactly paint a picture of a product that's cherished or actively invested in:
My EdgeRouter finally bit the dust after over a decade of service, and I decided to "upgraded" to a Dream Machine. I was hesitant due to the security breaches and now I really regret my decision.
UDMs are discounted right now for the holidays. I'm in the process of migrating my home networking/server stuff into a rack, and I was tempted to pick one up because my current little PFSense box isn't particularly rack-friendly. This thread is cooling my heels a bit.
When I bought the UDM-SE, I too was excited thinking it as an "upgrade". Only later realized it couldn't even do BGP like their entry level gateway products.
You can, yes. The bigger problem is that I also bought into their Protect products at the same time. And you lose a ton of functionality if you turn off cloud access.
I'm going to try to replicate notifications and stuff using Home Assistant and shut off the remote access completely, but I might as well have purchased a cheaper and better NVR + camera setup if I need to set up all of this stuff myself anyway...
Mostly remote monitoring capabilities. You don't get motion/detection/doorbell notifications, and the Protect app needs to VPN in to view cameras when you're not on the local network.
We were using Nest before and these would be huge UX downgrades for my not-tech-savvy spouse.
Ubiquitis Unifi controllers and the TP-Links clone called Omada always remind me of the glory days of the NoSQL fad. Want to install our software? Please add a third-party mongodb repository to install an obsolete version. They can't handle version upgrades of their own database properly, but hey! At least it's web-scale.
They also need a 32-bit version. The actual, easiest solution to appliance-ify Unifi OS was to take some "run it on your Raspberry Pi!" guide and convert the instructions to Debian 32-bit.
...with which you still need to fight with MongoDB.
I'm still running with a Turris Omnia as router, which served me very well for >7y, added a small legacy SSD, managed to setup everything and worked for a while, but TO is armhf architecture, which mongodb quit packaging for with version 3.x. LXC containers for armhf (Debian/Ubuntu) stopped being released too by official channels. But the latest shiny Unifi app requires MongoDB >= 4.x (Unifi app >=7.5).
"Ok, I'll just buy one of those small embedded boxes": purchase Odroid H3+ (x86_64), install stuff, add docker, start up mongodb5 container annnnddd... illegal instruction! Turns out with MongoDB 5 they decided that with pre-built packages everybody has AVX instructions anyway, and packages are built with the expectation AVX instructions are present... which is not always true for low-power devices or even servers (the Intel Jasper Lake CPU of the Odroid H3+ was released in Q1'21).
That's changed for some of them recently. The linuxserver.io container for 'unifi-controller' was deprecated in favor of 'unifi-network-application' [1] so they could quit bundling MongoDB. There's not much value there anymore IMO because it's no simpler than running standalone in a VM at that point.
At least with a VM I can shut it down, snapshot it, block incoming network access for everything but a canary deployment, update it, wait for my canary to come up properly, and then let everything else hit it. That gives the option of a rollback which is much harder with Docker.
I say that as someone using 'linuxserver.io/unifi-controller' which was a mistake I guess.
I don't think riley_dog means they somehow controls Unify APs with opnsense. I think he just configured the APs with the Unify controller, the never touched them again and left all routing to an opnsense box.
This seems to be a popular approach, as there are no attractive routers from Unify, there was the Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway (USG), which ran very hot but was affordable and small (EdgeRouterX-like). Now they have the Dreamrouter, which has everything in one, including Wifi. It looks like an Alexa tube. There is a gap in their offering if you ask me, I'm also looking for a nice simple 2 nic opnsense box (preferably a nuc(-like)), after I blew up my EdgeRouterX (used the wrong power supply).
pcengines apu platform is great if you're comfortable with command line. they are EOL now (no new hardware updates) but doing the same thing with any Linux box is trivial... plenty of off the shelf options for modular hardware.
The hardware was actually really good from what I could tell. Not a single issue that wasn't caused by my own misconfiguration. But the software, woof. The software was designed to do exactly one thing: look impressive to execs in a board meeting. It was nearly unusable for me. I don't recall any specifics, but all you really need to know is that it took multiple days to get a simple home network with a single AP and a single router set up. It was so much effort just to log in to the damn thing.
I went into this project excited at the prospect of all the cool monitoring and analytics I could do. Fancy security and remote access and whatnot. After I finally got everything configured, I never touched it again. There were a few times when I needed or wanted to get into it, but I couldn't remember the specific incantation and combination of software needed to access it, so I just didn't.
I'd love to have a solid system built on quality hardware. UniFi is notionally exactly what I want, and exactly what a lot of hackers and tinkerers want. But the quality of your hardware is pretty much irrelevant if your software wasn't designed to be used by humans.
So I'm stuck using consumer routers with open firmware. It's fine I guess.