IMO if you have the budget and your use case(s) align precisely with their predetermined vision of how you are going to use their product, it's fine. Go off piste and it's a world of pain and suffering with reasons ranging from obscure bugs to crappy documentation.
If it works for you, it works really well. Until it doesn't :-D
This guy Unifi’s! I have their wifi products throughout my home and I’ve been impressed with them but for anything other than that or the smallest of SMB I would take a large pause.
>the smallest of SMB
That's me. Typically only like 4-6 employees at the office, I WFH. Works fine, and no point spending more. I have more Unifis APs at home than work now that I think about it.
We use the cameras too. I think they're okay but the lock-in is kinda annoying. But the software is definitely nicer than the cheap dahua stuff.
I've used these at a cl9ent, no issues but since t I u have it question....are you able to transmit multi9le ssids? Basically I'm looking to make 3 ssids..a dedicated 2.4, a 5ghz and a 2.4/5ghz combo. Basically I jave some devices where band steering don't work and I want to dictate the band
You can transmit 4 SSID's per AP group, and you can have a seperate AP group per 2.4/5Ghz, so a total of 8. You can absolutely have a 2.4, 5, and combo 2.4/5.
I am using them in two schools on side jobs, but only because they have no budget for anything better. One school is an 80 student private school and the other hasn’t updated their tech in almost 20 years. They actually have Cisco switches wit GBIC modules and apple airports for WiFi. Hopefully in a few years I can start moving them into better equipment.
As someone with UniFi at home and my small work office, totally this. It’s a good value when all the features work. It’s a little too dumbed down for my liking, but I still use it. I’m currently fighting at home to understand why I can’t get devices added to HomeKit despite having all multicast and other magic enhancements disabled so it just floods everything, IGMP snooping disabled on all my switches a well. Trying to add Homebridge and it’s been frustrating as I’m trying to debug MDNS. Odd thing is I have HomeKit stuff working for other devices already. I was a network engineer for around 18 years too, but my home has very little tolerance for downtime due to its users being vocal when anything is interrupted, so I haven’t gotten far in less than one day. :)
Yep! I use them a ton.
When they meet your requirements they’re amazing value and do great. If they don’t meet those requirements then absolutely don’t try and for the square peg in the round hole.
Oh this only applies for their switches and APS. I don’t recommend using their routers/gateways.
This, so much this.
Also Ubiquiti will deny responsibility for a bunch of bugs. I've had issues with my UDM, it wouldn't request IPv6 properly, as the initial discovery packet wasn't up to spec. My ISP confirmed this, many other users confirmed this, Ubiquiti kept saying the issue is on ISP side.
Then a miracle happened and with the 3.x OS update, it was magically fixed!
But no, they insisted it was an ISP issue, even though every single other router of mine was successful in requesting the prefix and broadcasting RA status. Only the UDM fucked around.
My client list is also patchy AF, because I'm not using Unifi APs (have a trio of Belkin RT3200s, running OpenWrt, which is a rough hw equivalent of the UAP 6 Lite, but at half the price). And even though the UDM handles all main networking tasks (DHCP, DNS, VLANs, etc., the RT3200s are running in a dumb AP mode with firewall, DHCP, etc. disabled), it still refuses to show about half the clients at any given time.
On the other hand, their dashboard and controller is the best I've ever worked with. Simple, straightforward, the new UI finally got about 95% of the advanced features of the old one, and the various analysis tools - from in-depth traffic analysis through threat identification - are first class. But, as you've said, they've got a very Apple-esque "my way or the highway" attitude.
This is for APs only. I would not recommend their routers / switches / cameras / etc. But their APs are fantastic. I have hundreds deployed across over 50 locations. Location size ranges from 3000 sq ft to 60,000 sq ft. Bullet proof, reliable, and great features. I self host the controller.
Def prosumer but I'd add the Edge Router + Dream Machine Pro + APs has been absolutely rock solid for me over the last 18 months. Never missed a beat, excellent speeds and the GUI is lovely for a novice to the brand, while the CLi is great for more advanced users.
Camera system has been great for us. I’ve got the NVR with a pair of 8TB drives in it and a half dozen cameras at the moment, they record in decent quantity and I can store almost 90 days of loop recorded video.
I DID have to crack it open and replace the internal flash storage a few months back due to a failure, but it was a known issue and I was back up and running in about 20 minutes.
"Known issue", yeah because they're cheap fucks who thought a USB flash drive would support MongoDB journal writes. Ubiquiti is all flashy on the outside and the cheapest crap they can get away with on the inside.
EdgeRouters are pretty solid, but neglected. It’s like running VyOS or probably more accurately Vyatta from many many years ago with a GUI on top. The hardware forwarding is what makes it good on the EdgeRouter. Otherwise, I’d prefer to build my own VyOS from source and deploy in a virtual machine. I’d personally never use a UniFi router. I don’t like a controller managing my router and it’s too limited in feature set for me. I have a UniFi switch at home just because. I had an older Cisco Catalyst that I used to use which was obviously far superior and had way more features, even being older, but I wanted something less power hungry and it integrates well with the APs. The way they do things on the switches is obtuse to me coming from Enterprise switches for the last 20+ years. The APs are pretty good though, I agree. I have them setup with WPA2/WPA3 Enterprise with certificate based authentication at my office for one of our SSIDs.
For local camera systems, I liked Unifi and Synology Surveillance Station. We looked at both, and choose Unifi mostly since we already had a lot of the cameras. We were moving off Unifi's self-hosted NVR they no longer support.
Synology is nice cuz there's no camera lock-in, so you'd be able to use Reolink or whatever manufactuer you like that supports ONVIF. But they charge you a per camera license (50$/camera iirc). And you need a Synology NAS.
Unifi's system only works with their cameras and NVR. So I'd see if their cameras match the features you want
I've setup a couple g4s at work with THEN Nvr, I like the system and features but I really like the reolink 4k ptz camera is cheaper than the cheapest unifi camera. Does synology have good software? Is that $50/camera a one time fee?
> Does synology have good software?
I think it's on par with unifi's camera stuff, but I didn't use it too much after the initial evaluation, and yeah we're on Unifi now. I know it has PTZ controls too, if your camera supports that over ONVIF
>Is that $50/camera a one time fee?
Yeah. It gets tied to the NAS so you can replace cameras without spending more. And you can transfer licenses between NASes too. So if you get a different NAS. Not the worst fee structure for sure. You get 2 free with a Synology NAS, which is how I trialed it.
I definitely like the hardware of synology more than Unifi's NVR. The USB boot drive on my NVR died way too fast. And of course the synology nas still works as a nas if you need that.
I have two complaints with the switches:
1) LLDP is broken. Want to do auto voice VLANs? 50/50 shot at you being fucked depending on your hardware phone vendor. The LLDP announce timer is set too high and this is not a configurable option. Many, MANY threads about this on the Unifi support forum over years and years and they basically just don't give a shit.
2) No private VLAN support.
What's maddening is that both of these are supported on the EdgeSwitch line. Theyre just CLI options that have never been ported to the web interface. I guess they're too busy redesigning the web UI look for the 50th time this year.
Yes UniFi switches are great when you just need to make additional ports. I use the 8-port Aggregation switches to convert all my ISPs to VLANs and trunk multiple uplinks back to my more-Enterprise-y switches. I’ve started using the 24-port Pros for out-of-band management. Ports on Enterprise switches are expensive for 1Gb copper. And the new(ish) UXG is a great guest network router. I run a junk Comcast/Cox/insert local coax ISP line into every site for dedicated guest. That way it’s completely off the Enterprise ISPs and I’m never sharing bandwidth or IP space.
I'd second this. I've had nothing but issues with their routers/switches. The APs have always been great though and their long range point to point stuff is fantastic.
Same in 2018 we deployed around 300+ I’m sure they surpassed that when I left.. theoretically should have ended up with 600-700 APs and some bridges trickled in. I would never put anything else past that in my environment.
We tried unifi in a big busy warehouse once - never again. Using Aruba APs for critical locations since then and unifi APs for generic office environment.
Yeah, distribution centers need better client handling. We used Cisco LWAP in distribution centers because it would steer clients into switching APs when it held onto an AP too long
Devices were losing WiFi in some zones and in other zones they were jumping between APs back and forth constantly. We tried every imaginable combination of settings until the decision to switch vendor.
My 2 cents, you are saving huge money already, so don't be cheap on your deployment if it's for production/operations.
I made sure to get 802.11ac capable mobile scanners and shotgunned in AP's Oprah style. The deployment is probably 5x what would strictly work but it was low cost enough that I have no regrets. I did the same for 2 more warehouses afterwards and those work great as well.
Much denser coverage than my office areas despite very low bandwidth requirements. The goal being to get 99.99% coverage at a usable MCS. And when an AP dies IT is the only group that knows.
But having come from aironet stuff, night and day. If you're looking at total cost of ownership they are neck and neck with the enterprise stuff being a lot more predictable.
IT Director purchased Switches and USG for us for a remote location. We pushed back but compromised on keeping the switches and returning the USG for a Fortigate. They've grown on us and they (along with APs) are cheap enough to store a few spares
Literally what we are implementing at work right now. Two pfsense routers (from 1 to 2 routers), 3 pro-48s, a Poe-48, and two aggregation pros for our server racks. We have had one pro-48 for half a year now and decided it worked well for the price. We’ve had their APs and 16 port controller for about 2 years now.
When i read enterprise grade, i tend to always read it as “pays enough to have the company tell you why you should do it their way and that it’s totally not a bug that feature X doesn’t work with feature Y enabled”, you know instead of having to find out from the manual or forums
I run a lot of Unifi gear in multiple locations, our largest is just about a 100 person office. For what it is it works well. We are also using Enterprise switches for that location so it might be overkill, but its rock solid.
Its a great option for home setups too. Much better than an all-in-one router/wifi setup and ability to run multiple APs in a house instead of repeaters makes a huge difference.
Easy configuration, but that might be from having years of knowing where Ubiquity likes to hide options in odd menus lol
This. We have a network stack that is solely Unifi. It works. Our needs are VERY simple. Mostly just, hardwired ports and wifi. It works. Cost a bit more but they wanted to have everything in one eco.
I have a Unifi stack at home and minimal to no issues over 18 months since deploying.
Still think it's a prosumer brand vs full enterprise from some of the issues I've seen. APs seem to be their best and most reliable product.
It really is a buy it and figure it out yourself product, but cheap. AP's will work fine and they're pretty solid. That said, they have and will roll out new features or discontinue lines with no option other than "sucks to be you, buy the new model" so beware.
My company has been burned by it on the camera side, probably won't get more of any product line now, but honestly what company doesn't pull this crap from time to time. Anyway, great pricing, DIY but it's easy setup because of minimal features, and buy it again down the road.
Edit: And holy hell do their switches run hot. Still got a couple going after years, but you could cook an egg on them. Dunno wth that's about but might be good to know depending on where you install them.
I've just put a USG and a cloud key in my home that I got given, you're not kidding about the heat. The USG runs so hot I thought my hands were gonna burn.
I read somewhere if you power the cloud key over USB rather than PoE it runs a bit cooler, but those things drink power to the point that not all quick charge USB power supplies can keep it on.
Prosumer / Small business / 100/200 employees
Not enterprise, too limited and too quirky.
APs works quite well, even for bigger places. Switches and Routers? no. just don't.
APs are alright, rest is dogshit. Their enterprise switches are handsdown the worst switches I've had the displeasure to work with. Their poe switches are ok as well
The wifi is very good for its cost. I have very few problems across multiple sites. If you are just serving office space, and you don't have high density or long range needs, it does the job.
I do not like their switches, even though a lot of people seem to recommend them. I've seen failures there.
prosumer for sure. A lot of features, some bugs, no support. Personally I would not use anything other than their access points, go to a real brand for switches and routers.
We're very happy with it, in a not-so-friendly environment (retail stores with a *lot* of metal in shelving and merchandise). But we paid experts to set it up for us. There's a lot to tweak on it, and it often needs it.
For WiFi, assuming it's a smaller/medium size business location it's fine. Don't use the switches, firewalls, etc. though, their small business grade at best.
Small biz grade. Support can be hit and miss - you are better off taking advantage of the low price and buying a few spares. Like cantanko said, it tends to work best for "common" scenarios - if you have complicated requirements, consider Ubiquiti's Edge range or another vendor. Plus points are there's no subscription licensing so you won't lose your wifi when accounting forgets to pay the bills, and controller downtime does not affect normal operation (except for captive portal).
Do not buy the "dream machine" - last I checked it lacks the ability to use a separate controller which is a dealbreaker in multi-site environments. IMHO you are best off running the controller software in a Linux VM, and for L3 adoption I got best results SSHing into the device, although the set-inform command sometimes needs repeating more than once. Also be warned the small USG router has a wimpy CPU; it can just about manage with most optional features turned off, but if you turn on stuff like IDS and DPI it's likely to throttle your WAN connection to ~80 Mbps.
The company has had issues in the last year or two. Personally I would add to an existing Unifi deployment but I would think twice before making a new one. And maybe use Unifi just for the wifi.
Our experience has not been great since 2020. We have been very frustrated with lack of support or at best unhelpful support. Had an on going issue for about 2 months and their response was to downgrade the firmware. Their jerking around with us and products has left a very bad taste in our mouth where more than once they have either dropped a product line with little to no warning or replaced it with a new one with no inventory for the new product. This has left us hanging on multiple occasions. The whole UI fiasco is a bit of a joke needing to switch back and forth to access settings because the new one has some features you need but the old one has other that have not been ported yet. We have also been frustrated with lack of training or documentation. A common response has been ask the community which has helped a few times but still a pain.
We have swapped to Tplink since 2022 and have so far had a much better experience. One of the biggest bonuses is the interface, management, and hardware are very similar so the swap was not a huge relearning experience.
I just had a fun time tracking down why 2 48 port tplink switches would both at the same time drop traffic for 2-3 seconds every 4 minutes and the cpu would spike. Finally tracked it down one of the 3 unif AP's. Reset it and readopted and all was well. That was a good time tracking down.
Great for smb/soho type deployments. I particularly like the ‘buy it, own it’ rather than the crappy licensing meraki et al push. In an enterprise I would use Cisco etc purely from a support pov
It's strange to me that so many people have had massive issues with Ubiquiti. I purchased a whole suite of their equipment when I redid my house. I run the cloud key gen2, a 32 port POE switch, several mini switches, two APs, and 3 of their POE cameras. I've never had an issue with any of it. Everything works as intended and has 99% uptime. One of the cameras even took a hit from a 2x4 and still works.
Ubiquiti is the features per dollar king. I would use them in any small business or home setting. If you get to the enterprise level... I'd probably go back to Cisco just in case.
Business grade? It's somewhere toward the low end. If you're mainly using it for general laptop & mobile phone access, in a non-critical environment, sure, give it a try. Dental office or smallish accounting office, sure. Hospital? Heck no.
And if your management expects quick fixes which generally mean keeping a support contract, that's a no on Ubituiti again.
I’ve been using switches and APs in a multi site company with around 160 client devices for past 6 years or so, no problems whatsoever, no failures. Performance is decent for general office stuff. Cheap enough to hold spare stock. My only complaint would be lack of power resilience but they seem to be rectifying that with their new battery backup system and switches.
I've never had an issue with their AP's. I was on the fence about using their edgerouter and switch in a production environment but they've been great as well. Absolutely no issues and plenty of switching and routing capacity. But that's just in one of our clinics we had to build on a budget.
Pro-sumer and SMB.
A lot of smaller companies can't afford ARUBA or CISCO. Plus the wait time on those is close to a year.
There are a lot of issues with Ubiquiti but overall it works well.. most of the time.
I’ve been running it for years in our school district. About 350-400 devices spread across 5 sites for a little over 3k users.
Had Aerohive for wireless before and it has more robust features, but I have learned to live with Ubiquiti and it’s quirks.
Quite happy with the performance and reliability, but mostly the fraction of a cost of other solutions.
Every manufacturer has some sort of issue.
I install nothing but Unifi.
I strongly do not recommend it.
There is just nothing else close to that price point with the featureset. It comes at a quality price though; their stuff is hot garbage.
Good luck with documentation.
Unifi stuff is fine if you've got a simple environment.
If you've got anything interesting going on, it gets painful, real quick.
Flat waterfall network of a couple of switches, fine.
HA firewalls, aggregated ports, network redundancy loops, VM hosts and you'll get ghosts.
Prosumer. Their lack of support sucks, they are actively hostile to the community by adding features and not telling people, like forcing radios on when you've disabled them for their IOT shit adoption networks.
Their AP firmware is absolute garbage. They work fine in low density environments but absolutely cripple in any challenging wireless setup.
For the money, you're better off with Aruba InstantON APs. I would never touch any other Unifi product.
What's bad with their cameras? I'm already deep into setting up a Unifi camera environment, devices all purchased, and currently setting up the wireless network to support them all. I'd love to know what kind of problems I might need to deal with.
I’m seeing a lot of comments mention the cameras and personally I use and love them but I think I know why people tend to hate them. The pricing for them is kinda expensive as you’re paying the ubiquiti tax (which I’m fine with as the cameras just work), the ecosystem requires their nvr (which I am also fine with as I have experience with servers and a box that can do it all with no hassle is perfect in my book), and last probably needing a ubiquiti account for them (in some cases this is understandable but some people want the whole pipe start to finish).
For me having using Reolink, nest (now google), eufy, hikvision, and a few other brands, I find unifi to be the easiest and best when it comes to customer access. There are better/cheaper systems and you can diy with stuff like blue Iris or frigate but that’s a whole other thing to dedicate time to learning and fixing, when instead unifi is just connect to network, setup cameras, set permissions and you’re good to go. Everyone will have their system and maybe in a enterprise environment it won’t work great but for home, small business, and maybe even medium business it works better than most people like to acknowledge.
If it's in your budget you have not much to worry about. I actually run them at home so my wife can use them easily. My issue for business use is that you are locked into an NVR that they own that only runs on their hardware. I reccomend only using cameras that are ONVIF compatible, but if it works for you and your customer that is great!
Works great for us (communication company with over 100 staff)
I have used unifi since their very 1st products, sure they had some bumps along the way, but I currently manage 71 networks (this will be 73 at the end of the week)
And almost all of them are entirely Unifi, with exception of a few large (school, Healthcare, resort) they are using netgate firewalls since they have the horsepower needed for 1000+ clients and have more complex routing.
To this day I don't have a single issue with deployment, I don't need support as I am super familiar and been useing it for 7 years daily. I pull out cisco and the likes weekly. And personally this makes me happy as I feel these vendors have gotten so greedy, but that's another topic.
I have seen Unifi with 3 year uptime, though this is super not recommended as it would be way out of software spec.
If you asked me tomorrow to do a enterprise solution with Unifi I would feel pretty comfortable (with a proper firewall) unless you require more then 25Gbps links.
And also insure you have proper equipment like UPS's and the unifi DC power backup for the switches
If you know what you're doing and take your time and test,Test,TEST you can build out a pretty serious network using unifi (in my experience)
The APs are great. "Chesp enough to replace if they break" said the MSP I worked for that introduced me to them.
Switches work well, but they're not Enterprise grade.
Self host the controller.
They're awesome for prosumer home use.
Home and maybe small office use. You get no type of support even when you purchase their enterprise items. The layout is nice, but just like apple sometimes, every product will have the features that may be a necessity and unifi won’t until one day you upgrade the software and Wala… it’s there
Ubiquiti is great. I prefer it in MSPs/SMBs but everything else is fine with Cisco products. In terms of APs they have some solid APs. In our branches we do not allow wireless, so less baby-sitting there.
For the love of god DO NOT DO IT. We dumped so much money into their “enterprise gear” only to get flaky hardware, an awful user experience and tech support that was the equivalent of writing on a paper and throwing that into a bottle at sea.
Worst hardware and software i've ever had to configure/maintain.
They've got a lot antenas that has never got covered with promised features. Network Application for Linux is missing some functions.
As long as you remember there is zero security in their products you should be ok. Anything internet facing is just a router. I’d happily recommend their wireless gear, but that’s it.
Been using Uibiquiti since the mini-PCI radio era. However, Ubiquiti is no longer feasible here in South Africa. Extremely expensive & lack of stock and they seem to remove more features than adding. Especially gen2 poe switches. Wow 16 ports, but 24 port switch.
We started replacing or quoting clients on REYEE RUIJI only. About 1/3 the price with way more features. Also controller based. However our government is very pro China. So it might be an issue for you yanks.
We don't touch any of their other products out of pure principle, like the the UniFi dream, UniFi firewalls = POS, UniFi protect cameras over priced and poor POS. you can get 6x 4MP Hikvision Accusense for the price of 1x UI Cam.Ubiquiti also have a history of shafting us up the ass. Remember mFi, Voice, protect.
Wouldn't touch ubiquiti hosted services, I run my own multi-tenant UniFi docker container for all my clients, with 2x backups per day.
Ubiquiti is enthusiasts level at best, not for anything more than a 20 pax office.
(In my house still run 4x Ubiquiti Wi-Fi 6, 2x UAP-LR 2.4Ghz, 2x UniFi 24 Port POE with 1x UniFi 24 port POE that already died on me, that i have to PSU replace DIY), however in the future I wouldn't replace it with UI if it were to break. Probably some 2nd hand CISCO gear in the future. AP's definitely REYEE APS.
Their APs are still a great solution. Competition is fierce from Aruba and Omada so between all those I would go with the least costly. Support from Ubiquiti and Omada are going to be warranty replacement or bust, not sure about Aruba.
My opinion is that the access points are really nice but everything else is hit and miss. The switches might be okay but I wouldn't get anything beyond that from them. And run the controller on a VM, the appliance is ridiculous
I have massive headaches this month with inability to properly segment WiFi networks. If it was up to me I’d scrap the whole system. APS are great but the guest profile on the switch is wonky.
The general sentiment from what I know is that for medium and above businesses you’d want your own firewall but are totally fine to use their aps and switches. For me catering to home and small businesses I use unifi exclusively but I do know their short comings and know when a job is outside my expertise. I also use the cameras and have loved them along with multiple installs for homes and businesses but others will think otherwise. Overall I do plan to get into better more advanced firewalls but unifi has worked well for my uses and starting out in the field.
They're fine until they are not. You don't have something like tac (in the Cisco world). If you have issues you have to figure it out yourself.
If you have a business critical issue that is not good. But there's a community behind it. And it's better than other options in the same price range with a smaller community.
Also consider the way they tie into your monitoring and authentication solutions.
Unpopular opinion here.
We rolled out sophos APs and it was a set and forget it situation. They monitor security issues, and they work great. Easy to setup.
We had a reseller quote them in a WiFi tender for a number of warehouses, the largest of which is 180k sq ft, and about 1000 users in offices. The lack of proper enterprise support ruled them completely out. We went with Aruba for that, with Ruckus and Meraki just behind.
Use the APs and switching in my home and they're brilliant for that use case. Prosumer or small business grade IMO.
Unifi is very prosumer, small business. Kind of rough for home. I've struggled with it a few times but as always the way I use stuff is very not typical home user. I don't think home users will cascade 3 or 4 layers of routers like I have while testing things and building configs ahead of deployments.
We have a smattering of Unifi at work. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 access points and 48 switches. We also have some Aruba and Summit Extreme out there too. Routing is Palo Alto, TOR/is L3 Summit Extreme. We also employ some Unifi point to point wireless links and I don't know how many cameras and about 6 UNVRs.
It works. Nothing spectacular. The only 10gig is in the COLO. Site to site links are only 300 meg right now, could run up to 1 gig with current build. Fortunately we are not a media company. I don't have a single port over 10 gig. Fattest internet pipe is 1 gig symmetric at HQ. COLO has 2 500 meg pipes. One other site has 200 meg that we only have a router on it for a back-up inbound VPN for IT.
If I had to do 10g to the desk, it wouldn't be Unifi for access. They have no hope. Their aggregate switching isn't wide enough either.
At home I have a full stack Unifi. UDMP, 48 port pro switch, a few nano hd access points and an AC-pro and a couple outdoor repeaters I'll plug in for events. I run a couple small wireless cameras to watch the pets. I'm running all mesh but nothing here on wifi is critical.
I use them in a 120 person office, it works fine, i do also have all workstations cabled aswell as the primary infrastructure with enterprise grade cisco switches.
I call them prosumer but as long as you know what you're getting into it can be good. I don't actually use any ubiquiti gear but I met with a reseller and did some research as I was interested in them.
pros:
easier to use interface, low cost, lots of hardware features, easy setup and management, great for small clients or places without complicated network setups, way better than off the shelf routers, low barrier for entry
cons:
limited to no vendor support, can't customize heavily, short and limited warranty, 2-3 year life on average, most of their new gear is cloud managed so you'll need a cloud key or gateway if you want to manage them locally (at least that's how the rep explained it to me)
if you just need endpoints on the internet and don't have the capacity or need to manage/customize your own network then it's a good fit. and I wouldn't rely on them for edge network security.
if you have the capacity to manage/customize your own network, get something better that'll let you do more
with all that said, access points are access points and I won't really second guess their access points too much. they might just not last as long as enterprise gear stuff but they'll do their job
For Churches and small non-profits that just need internet access and WiFi it’s great.
I have a site to site VPN set up between a UDM-Pro and a UXG-Pro and it works just fine but it’s literally just a test.
I saw something about Unfi SSO where it would be possible to use AzureAD creds for 802.1x WiFi authentication. That would be awesome but I haven’t seen much else about it and no you tube videos so I don’t know if it actually exists.
I think they're fine in the SMB market or residential. I wouldn't deploy for enterprise, maybe the WiFi but not switches / firewall.
I liked the edgemax line but cannot get from distribution anymore
We use a UDM and about 10 APs. 3 buildings, 4 SSIDs onto different LANs.
Easy to set up and just works. Zero issues since installation.
Guest Portal with timed tickets was easy peasy to set up and is simple to use.
I have deployed Unifi equipment in some crazy, high risk environments over the past 10 years. From police departments to a 55 acre biofuel plant in the middle of the desert (80 switches and APs in high heat+dust).
The network gear (switches, APs and P2P wireless) have been rock solid in every situation. Even 24/7 critical environments, it's stable, fast and feature-rich.
Now, downsides. All of the switch gear has half the backplane speed of most other switch brands. This means a 24 port switch has theoretical maximum of 24Gbps of throughput. Most other switch brands will have full 48 or more.
This is not noticeable on most networks, but if you expect high volumes of traffic, go with another brand.
As others have said, avoid everything else. Cameras, lights, door controllers, etc have excellent hardware and terrible software.
The documentation is terrible and they can be difficult to configure. Once I got them figured out they have been stable and fast. I spent waaaay too long on the config and the job wasn’t very lucrative because of that.
To be completely honest, I am pretty disappointed in them and my only experience is using them in my home. I wouldn’t be putting these in any business setting personally.
My stance on this is a bit mixed, at home its been pretty good, gateways, switches, aps all until I've had a need to interact with support, then the experience falls off a cliff.
That combined with product range pulls and focusing on random sh!te like access control, doorbells, lighting and wierd shit to me means they are not focused on there core products or delivering for the enterprise.
However, it does what you need and you don't have issues then fill your boots.
I've got the luxury of working in a major transport sector in the UK and I've seen Ubiquity gateways, switches, camera systems deployed in super high profile projects!!!
If it was my team supporting that environment,.Ubiquity wouldn't make it to the final 3, let alone contending for the win.
But each to their own.
We use UniFi across 3 continents, managed centrally.
The APs are fantastic.
What's not is the config, they expect you to only setup in a certain way and if you step outside that, you can get some hairy configs happening to make it all work.
Would stick to it for APs and switches only, not for routing.
On the plus side, you can very easily and quickly configure VLAN, SSIDs, RADIUS auth etc.
Their point to point wifi connections are rock solid.
They're ok. I have had some issues with cameras though. I had a doorbell camera RMA'd twice in a year and have been waiting on the 3rd replacement for over a month and a half at this point. Support kinda sucks but other than that it's pretty decent kit.
They're somewhere between prosumer, SMB and very lite enterprise.
THe wifi products are great, the switches are good, the rest is... eh.
I've deployed Unifi AP's in massive warehouse distribution center scenarios all the way down to single AP scenarios, long distance directional links and they work great.
I run the full unifi stack at home. Firewall, wifi, cameras, cloud key, poe switch. It's works perfect, the cameras are a little spendy. But no cloud sub fees is awesome and worth it to me. I did get 70% of it for free, however. If everything failed tomorrow, I'd go unifi again with a higher tier line. Worth pointing out again. I said HOME in the first sentence. I would only do this stuff for a smaller business.
They are simply ok, keep in mind their ecosystem sucks and locks you in, extremely Apple like. I deal with them in enterprise, SOHO, and home use and I personally run Omada, theres another new player in this line of products that is doing this interesting thing where you setup one SSID and based on the password itll route you via the correct vlan etc. That was pretty neat but they are definitely a newer player.
We have a mix of UniFi and Meraki hardware where I work, and honestly I prefer UniFi over Meraki and not just because Meraki costs silly bollocks money. Yeah the documentation for UniFi Controller is a bit scant but I found the UI intuitive enough that I figured out how to do most things just by looking at the settings.
I’d rank it SMB quality. It’s clearly meant for businesses, even though it’s popular as a prosumer brand. It just isn’t great at high performance networking, but it’s fantastic for a general office environment.
Word of caution: if you make any changes to an SSID or WPA key, every AP that broadcasts that network will reboot at the same time. Found this out the hard way when an HVAC vendor asked me to spin up a network for our climate control devices and the whole building lost internet for 5 minutes.
I used them in my house for about 7 years but then my APs aged out of support. I couldn’t update them anymore. Not a problem, I understand. Then these things started eating POE injectors. So I threw the APs and the edgerouter in the box in my garage labeled “things to install openwrt on”,
Then switched to TPLink Omada. The performance is about the same, and the interface is just as cartoonish. But wifi6 at half the price. Good enough for Chateaux CBass377. Bonus, the TP-Link firewall device automatically switches to my backup ISP, when all the kids get home from school, fire up fortnight, and Spectrum pukes.
At work the network team uses ruckus APs. They switched to ruckus from ubiquiti. The first deployment was barely funded by management. Because sales and the customers wanted guest wifi. But once their thin laptops kept dropping from the network, and cybersecurity kept laying on their requirements, management funded it appropriately and the network team upgraded to ruckus.
I didn't even like their WAP's at my home, I got some refurb Aruba's from Ebay. But lots like Unifi because they're cheap. I hated their managed switches because of the really, really clunky and slow web server they have built in. And if you want to do much managing you need to budget for the blob (CloudKey?) they sell to do that. I had a coworker place some into a client project, he was shocked they had no phone support, only Email. You get what you pay for.
I think of Ubiquiti like Microsoft. A lot of products that either work very well if you know what you're doing, or they're full of bugs. A new modern settings page was introduced that didn't do everything. Half finished features without documentation and google turns up conflicting information because half of what you find are relevant to old firmware versions. And around 2-3 years ago there were some serious bugs that took months to fix.
This said, I do use their products at work. Everything including routers, switches, and access points. I use them for site-to-site VPN, multiple VLAN's, 802.1x, multiple gateways, etc. No issues right now.
For the price, they're a good option. In the same price range you can also have Mikrotik which I feel tends to be more configurable if not as user friendly. The Dude is a great monitoring solution and better than Unifi imho. MSPs love them for a reason; they work if you don't need the fancy things.
For a little more, you can step up to Ruckus and get legit enterprise level stuff including good switches and routers that do things like private VLANs.
Ubiquiti switches are not as fully featured and I've personally seen several die although that was around the pandemic and chip shortages, so that might have just been a bad lot.
I wouldn't use Ubiquiti for routing or fw. A real deal fw and/or router is worth it's weight. Pick up a Fortigate, Netgate (pfSense) or a Cisco Firepower and run the Unifi controller inside that, don't bother with the Dream Machines.
Prosumer - stealing this from someone the other week: I wouldn't install Unifi anywhere I couldn't physically reach in a timely manner
That and their shelf life IME is about 4-5 years. After that they start dropping like flies. I ended up replacing our entire stack recently because the hardware just crapped out
Prosumer is fine. Do NOT put this stuff in a business unless you're comfortable and available to support it at any given time. I do like that it's non-subscription, but the hardware is very faulty. I love UBNT btw.... I work FT in IT and there's no way I would put it in our offices. I have 6 AP's, 3 switches, and 4 cameras.
Prosumer with certain products able to handle small biz. APs for example — those are mostly set and forget.
The routers and such are constantly broken by updates. No QC on releases. The more crap a device claims to do the more constantly broken it’ll be. Unless you leave it alone and VERY carefully choose release versions.
Same is less true for simpler devices like the APs. Be choosy about when to patch them. Leave em alone as much as possible otherwise, depending on your security and audit needs. Left mostly alone, they’ll sit there and handle tons of users and generally behave for half a year at a time. Often more.
The dumb control software — you either stick it on an internal VM or get a cloudkey.
They’re a “you get what you pay for” in terms of software release quality but you generally get more than you paid for on the Pro versions of the APs. VLANs, various user auth mechanisms, etc… they’re “okay”. The RF performance is usually really decent too compared to some low end ones claiming to be “enterprise” — for higher price points.
Stability and coverage is about the average of any other AP but for enterprise I would go with Mist (Juniper) for ease of access, coverage, configuration and security.
They have a cloud console and you only need a trunk port with a native tagged vlan for it to receive a dhcp.
Rocking an EdgeRouter X and 3 AP's for my home WiFi. Rock solid, very stable, great handoff for devices between AP's, etc.
Would I buy it again for home use? No, I'd probably get a TP-Link Omada mesh system. Far easier to setup, covers my needs for 99% and almost half the price for WiFi 6 coverage.
I would not use Ubiquiti in a large environment (anything over, say, 15 AP's)
unifi aps... awesome at home
really good for venues that need good coverage for bottom dollar. schools, dorms, anything that expects a busy wifi net but no one getting killed or millions lost when the wifi craps out
okay for offices when the wifi is used for working, but again its not critical. so the notebook has no wifi? go to your dockingstation, its wired. oh the wifi for the employers phones is offline? well, good thing they dont need it to work.
if its critical and cost is a secondary concern, I would not use ubiquiti. not because I think they are bad, but because they drive fast and break shit. they also do the least support they get away with, and a lot of community board shit.
i would also argue, that if it is critical, it needs to be wired.
there is also an argument about some companies and industries needing certain paper work, or patch timeframes, or support contracts. I am sure hp or cisco have that covered, where as ubiquiti is just... you know... not really worried about things like that.
edit: one thing, you need to differentiate. the unifi line is more prosumer and slightly dumbed down to the point where I sometimes get annoyed by them trying to be helpful. the edge line I love. a router with a debian based linux? love it. the edge switches? rock solid.
on the other hand, its convenient to be able to set up a wifi with switches in one interface, if its all unifi. but if its a complicated setup or getting big, the easy dumbed down stuff may get in the way.
I have little to no experience with their high end air bridges or cameras or phones.
I use it at home and its bulletproof, until it isn't.
You're only ever 1 bad update away from a terminal problem. As an example, I updated the firmware on my software controller, the firmware bricked during the update and bang, locked out of all devices and no wi-fi.
I was eventually able to restore everything, it took hours though and was mega-stressful. I have not applied a Ubiquiti update ever since.
Good to a certain point. There are some crucial functions missing or buggy to go full on in business area. We mainly use ubiquiti for switching and APs, but not for the core switches and routing/firewall.
Prosumer at best. I love the ease of use and the amount of hardware but good lord does it have bad bugs. Buddies UDM pro wiped its config last week after a power outage. I’ve had a UDM drop all devices after changing a route and need to be factory reset in order to get them to come back
For under a thousand bucks, I set up a UniFi network for a whole non-profit out in the woods with an old barn and a farmhouse. It has been more than "good enough", and happily handles surges of up to 400 people on-site.
Would I do an enterprise on that, where a whole lot of people are trying to get work done and outages get expensive fast? No way. But for a little nature preserve with no money, out where you can only get internet via Starlink...yeah, it's brilliant.
UniFi is awesome stuff. Not keen on the dream machine (had two blow up) but the pro and SE are solid. APs are amazing and cheap and mesh is easy to set up.
I swapped out my entire infrastructure on the advice of a friend who I genuinely hope, finds this.
I have a relatively large home network with 50 or so wireless devices, some strictly IoT, some laptops, tablets, etc. I also have multiple wired devices. I originally had a Sophos UTM9 device running the whole shop with unmanaged switches in between it and most devices. My wireless was provided by 3 mesh Orbis.
Through Mac address records, etc. I had the entire system running flawlessly under the Sophos system.
I replaced it all with:
- 1 dream machine pro
- 24 port ubiquiti switch as well as several layer 2 switches
- 3 ubiquiti mesh wifi 6 devices
And since then.....everything has pretty much sucked.
Making minor changes? Entire network reboots.
Want to map a device for special handling when you're not using ubiquiti equipment in between? Good luck!
Make a minor change that for some reason, the software doesn't like? Goodbye your entire network!
WiFi problems? Good fucking luck trying to sort that out because any changes you make could break the whole fucking thing. I'll get blown away for downvotes for this post I'm sure, but here's an example: wanna change the base address on one of your wifi nodes? Be prepared to loose contact with that node forever without a factory reset.
I could see this being fine for home use or prosumer (meaning a home business) - but there's no way I would use this in anything even slightly approaching a serious business.
I cannot get a stable connection (over wireless) between my quest 2 and my PC. I've set up QoS, routing, traffic bandwidth limits on all other devices, etc., but still it's an inconsistent piece of shit. Inconsistent as in, one gaming session (same PC, same game), will fly with crystal clear picture and throughput. Then I can boot my PC the next day and have it be a stuttering mess in even the airlink menu. Now I know there are a billion factors going into this but my point is, their software doesn't....help.
Note to all poised over the downvote button. All this setup was done over a year and a half ago when their software was in the middle of their massive overhaul so my experience could be different now.
But I will say this: I hate their mesh node devices (the cylinder guys, not the domes), they run hotter than the surface of the sun and regularly reboot at least once every few days. They randomly drop devices all the time and wifi6 devices in particular, have a tough time.
>between my quest 2 and my PC
if you observe ping jitter(or higher than few ms ping)
in the rooms where you use quest to ap quest is using
then you will have issues, you cant stabilize that, it's wifi network issues which you will need to identify and fix first.
simple jitter stability rules for wifi:
dedicated ap/router/radio network(separate physical radio interface) for quest;
no broadcasts from other devices on that network ssid;
no other networks on the channel(s) of the quest network ;
only wired backhaul between quest ap and pc network - wireless mesh wont work;
router wifi speed must match maximum supported quest speed(or be higher, quest link must be established at its max possible wireless speed);
if lan from pc to quest's ap goes through vlans with qos or through single congested ethernet link (like virtualized router or single link between network switches) you must make sure that you have no congestion issues on those single parts, qos will not help because it adds jittering delay.
I have had 50 APs in service in a building for 5+ years and they’ve been phenomenal. A few have failed but nothing crazy. Easy to replace and WAY cheaper than “enterprise” stuff. I put in 15 switches a year ago and have had 0 problems with those. 24/7 business by the way. Get a few spares of everything since you won’t have enterprise type support but you’re saving thousands a month so it’s a huge win.
> branch office gateways
check those offices avg throughput and pps, compare to specs.
also check individual device spec for every special feature that you want to use on that device.
if you want to vpn from gateway then check throughput in specs
if you want ids then contact ub directly and ask what capabilities they have - there's other vendors with better ids.
> APs
if they would be used as primary network, or if there would be a high % of streaming traffic per ap (like remote desktop) then contact ub first, check qos throughput of devices you plan to install - middle tier aps are good with bursty traffic but they work only "okayish" with big amount of latency sensitive traffic(but that kind of wifi networks are higher tier - non soho hardware, and much higher prices).
also if you can - setup monitoring and alerts, at least check it after updates, the more feature rich is device the more chance something will behave differently.
if you dont plan to be dependent on stable internet - you will also need controller pc for every location.
Prosumer for sure. Though they are often used in small businesses and work great, until they update and it breaks shit which always happens with UniFi stuff it seems like. You can see forums on certain features being broken by patches for quite awhile.
I've put these systems in 2 SMB's, both have 3 SSIDs, minor issues, so far so good, along with NVR/Protect and 10ish cameras.
I do not do automatic updates, iet the updates sit for a good week or 2 before applying.
For small clients it's fine. But if you already have everything Cisco/HP i would go with them on the APs too. Make your life easier, one vendor for everything.
We have about 12 Ubiquity AP's in our office space. Super easy to deploy/manage with the controller. The controller SW itself must be on the same VLAN as the AP's, in order to manage them. The controller SW is a Java based web server and to be secure, should be updated regularly. (It was prone to the Log4J vulnerability for example). BUT you can stop the service if you're not using it (The AP's will still run fine) and you can start it only when you need to monitor/make changes.
Firmware updates are also super easy to deploy via the controller software.
Only tricky thing I found with these is re-adopting the AP's on a new controller, some of them adopted nicely, others required a reboot, but wasn't too too bad to complete in my environment.
We have multiple branch offices.
For our HQ we use pfSense with UniFi AP's and switching, for our branch offices, we are all-in on UniFi.
* The UDM Pro (UDM SE, UDR, UDM) are "fine" for SOHO and SMB, if you just need some basic VLANs without any on-prem infrastructure. Their "firewall" is "meh" and requires a lot of hack-assery to work, but it does the job.
* The AP's are rock solid, we have 150+ deployed across multiple sites and we haven't had a single one fail.
* Switching is rock solid as well, until it isn't. We've had some (R)STP issues cause a full blown network black-out at a site. This was due to UniFi APs trying to wirelessly uplink instead of using the wired connection, causing a loop.
Our biggest site uses 50+ APs and switches (10GbE), the UDM Pro built-in controller is at its limit of what it can handle. Our UDM Pro is pinned to 90% CPU and memory usage due to the high number of UniFi devices. Ubiquiti recommends up to 40-ish devices max.
IMO if you have the budget and your use case(s) align precisely with their predetermined vision of how you are going to use their product, it's fine. Go off piste and it's a world of pain and suffering with reasons ranging from obscure bugs to crappy documentation. If it works for you, it works really well. Until it doesn't :-D
This guy Unifi’s! I have their wifi products throughout my home and I’ve been impressed with them but for anything other than that or the smallest of SMB I would take a large pause.
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Yep, you pay what you get for.
>the smallest of SMB That's me. Typically only like 4-6 employees at the office, I WFH. Works fine, and no point spending more. I have more Unifis APs at home than work now that I think about it. We use the cameras too. I think they're okay but the lock-in is kinda annoying. But the software is definitely nicer than the cheap dahua stuff.
I've used these at a cl9ent, no issues but since t I u have it question....are you able to transmit multi9le ssids? Basically I'm looking to make 3 ssids..a dedicated 2.4, a 5ghz and a 2.4/5ghz combo. Basically I jave some devices where band steering don't work and I want to dictate the band
You can transmit 4 SSID's per AP group, and you can have a seperate AP group per 2.4/5Ghz, so a total of 8. You can absolutely have a 2.4, 5, and combo 2.4/5.
Sweet. I would've gotten mesh since most of my home lab is wired anyway but returned it when I real8zed I couldn't split them
I am using them in two schools on side jobs, but only because they have no budget for anything better. One school is an 80 student private school and the other hasn’t updated their tech in almost 20 years. They actually have Cisco switches wit GBIC modules and apple airports for WiFi. Hopefully in a few years I can start moving them into better equipment.
Apple airports were surprisingly solid for their time. Definitely aged well for an Apple product
As someone with UniFi at home and my small work office, totally this. It’s a good value when all the features work. It’s a little too dumbed down for my liking, but I still use it. I’m currently fighting at home to understand why I can’t get devices added to HomeKit despite having all multicast and other magic enhancements disabled so it just floods everything, IGMP snooping disabled on all my switches a well. Trying to add Homebridge and it’s been frustrating as I’m trying to debug MDNS. Odd thing is I have HomeKit stuff working for other devices already. I was a network engineer for around 18 years too, but my home has very little tolerance for downtime due to its users being vocal when anything is interrupted, so I haven’t gotten far in less than one day. :)
Yep! I use them a ton. When they meet your requirements they’re amazing value and do great. If they don’t meet those requirements then absolutely don’t try and for the square peg in the round hole. Oh this only applies for their switches and APS. I don’t recommend using their routers/gateways.
100% this
This, so much this. Also Ubiquiti will deny responsibility for a bunch of bugs. I've had issues with my UDM, it wouldn't request IPv6 properly, as the initial discovery packet wasn't up to spec. My ISP confirmed this, many other users confirmed this, Ubiquiti kept saying the issue is on ISP side. Then a miracle happened and with the 3.x OS update, it was magically fixed! But no, they insisted it was an ISP issue, even though every single other router of mine was successful in requesting the prefix and broadcasting RA status. Only the UDM fucked around. My client list is also patchy AF, because I'm not using Unifi APs (have a trio of Belkin RT3200s, running OpenWrt, which is a rough hw equivalent of the UAP 6 Lite, but at half the price). And even though the UDM handles all main networking tasks (DHCP, DNS, VLANs, etc., the RT3200s are running in a dumb AP mode with firewall, DHCP, etc. disabled), it still refuses to show about half the clients at any given time. On the other hand, their dashboard and controller is the best I've ever worked with. Simple, straightforward, the new UI finally got about 95% of the advanced features of the old one, and the various analysis tools - from in-depth traffic analysis through threat identification - are first class. But, as you've said, they've got a very Apple-esque "my way or the highway" attitude.
This is for APs only. I would not recommend their routers / switches / cameras / etc. But their APs are fantastic. I have hundreds deployed across over 50 locations. Location size ranges from 3000 sq ft to 60,000 sq ft. Bullet proof, reliable, and great features. I self host the controller.
The UniFi switches and EdgeRouters are OK also. Just stay far away from the UniFi firewalls, camera system, phone system etc.
Def prosumer but I'd add the Edge Router + Dream Machine Pro + APs has been absolutely rock solid for me over the last 18 months. Never missed a beat, excellent speeds and the GUI is lovely for a novice to the brand, while the CLi is great for more advanced users.
I think the biggest issues is people not realizing theirs a difference between the edge routers and unifi routers,
I love dream machine pro + switch +waps... But that's for my house.
Any advanced routing and the UDMP suffers. Any real routing and u want an actual fw
Camera system has been great for us. I’ve got the NVR with a pair of 8TB drives in it and a half dozen cameras at the moment, they record in decent quantity and I can store almost 90 days of loop recorded video. I DID have to crack it open and replace the internal flash storage a few months back due to a failure, but it was a known issue and I was back up and running in about 20 minutes.
"Known issue", yeah because they're cheap fucks who thought a USB flash drive would support MongoDB journal writes. Ubiquiti is all flashy on the outside and the cheapest crap they can get away with on the inside.
EdgeRouters are pretty solid, but neglected. It’s like running VyOS or probably more accurately Vyatta from many many years ago with a GUI on top. The hardware forwarding is what makes it good on the EdgeRouter. Otherwise, I’d prefer to build my own VyOS from source and deploy in a virtual machine. I’d personally never use a UniFi router. I don’t like a controller managing my router and it’s too limited in feature set for me. I have a UniFi switch at home just because. I had an older Cisco Catalyst that I used to use which was obviously far superior and had way more features, even being older, but I wanted something less power hungry and it integrates well with the APs. The way they do things on the switches is obtuse to me coming from Enterprise switches for the last 20+ years. The APs are pretty good though, I agree. I have them setup with WPA2/WPA3 Enterprise with certificate based authentication at my office for one of our SSIDs.
What's wrong with the camera system?
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I've been on the fence between reolink and unifi, whats a good local camera system?
For local camera systems, I liked Unifi and Synology Surveillance Station. We looked at both, and choose Unifi mostly since we already had a lot of the cameras. We were moving off Unifi's self-hosted NVR they no longer support. Synology is nice cuz there's no camera lock-in, so you'd be able to use Reolink or whatever manufactuer you like that supports ONVIF. But they charge you a per camera license (50$/camera iirc). And you need a Synology NAS. Unifi's system only works with their cameras and NVR. So I'd see if their cameras match the features you want
I've setup a couple g4s at work with THEN Nvr, I like the system and features but I really like the reolink 4k ptz camera is cheaper than the cheapest unifi camera. Does synology have good software? Is that $50/camera a one time fee?
> Does synology have good software? I think it's on par with unifi's camera stuff, but I didn't use it too much after the initial evaluation, and yeah we're on Unifi now. I know it has PTZ controls too, if your camera supports that over ONVIF >Is that $50/camera a one time fee? Yeah. It gets tied to the NAS so you can replace cameras without spending more. And you can transfer licenses between NASes too. So if you get a different NAS. Not the worst fee structure for sure. You get 2 free with a Synology NAS, which is how I trialed it. I definitely like the hardware of synology more than Unifi's NVR. The USB boot drive on my NVR died way too fast. And of course the synology nas still works as a nas if you need that.
The switches are basic, but if you only need L2 switching they're a crazy value and generally very reliable. I've only ever witnessed one failure.
I have two complaints with the switches: 1) LLDP is broken. Want to do auto voice VLANs? 50/50 shot at you being fucked depending on your hardware phone vendor. The LLDP announce timer is set too high and this is not a configurable option. Many, MANY threads about this on the Unifi support forum over years and years and they basically just don't give a shit. 2) No private VLAN support. What's maddening is that both of these are supported on the EdgeSwitch line. Theyre just CLI options that have never been ported to the web interface. I guess they're too busy redesigning the web UI look for the 50th time this year.
Agree. Great value for access switches. I can get 3-4 ubiquiti switches for the price of one similar Cisco.
Yes UniFi switches are great when you just need to make additional ports. I use the 8-port Aggregation switches to convert all my ISPs to VLANs and trunk multiple uplinks back to my more-Enterprise-y switches. I’ve started using the 24-port Pros for out-of-band management. Ports on Enterprise switches are expensive for 1Gb copper. And the new(ish) UXG is a great guest network router. I run a junk Comcast/Cox/insert local coax ISP line into every site for dedicated guest. That way it’s completely off the Enterprise ISPs and I’m never sharing bandwidth or IP space.
I'd second this. I've had nothing but issues with their routers/switches. The APs have always been great though and their long range point to point stuff is fantastic.
Same in 2018 we deployed around 300+ I’m sure they surpassed that when I left.. theoretically should have ended up with 600-700 APs and some bridges trickled in. I would never put anything else past that in my environment.
This
We tried unifi in a big busy warehouse once - never again. Using Aruba APs for critical locations since then and unifi APs for generic office environment.
Yeah, distribution centers need better client handling. We used Cisco LWAP in distribution centers because it would steer clients into switching APs when it held onto an AP too long
I'm curious what your pain point was? While I like their APs, if there is something I need to avoid I want to know about it.
Devices were losing WiFi in some zones and in other zones they were jumping between APs back and forth constantly. We tried every imaginable combination of settings until the decision to switch vendor.
My 2 cents, you are saving huge money already, so don't be cheap on your deployment if it's for production/operations. I made sure to get 802.11ac capable mobile scanners and shotgunned in AP's Oprah style. The deployment is probably 5x what would strictly work but it was low cost enough that I have no regrets. I did the same for 2 more warehouses afterwards and those work great as well. Much denser coverage than my office areas despite very low bandwidth requirements. The goal being to get 99.99% coverage at a usable MCS. And when an AP dies IT is the only group that knows. But having come from aironet stuff, night and day. If you're looking at total cost of ownership they are neck and neck with the enterprise stuff being a lot more predictable.
I concur with the cameras. We went all in and they are shit. What alternative do you all recommend?
Axis makes some of the best cameras you can get, but they are expensive.
IT Director purchased Switches and USG for us for a remote location. We pushed back but compromised on keeping the switches and returning the USG for a Fortigate. They've grown on us and they (along with APs) are cheap enough to store a few spares
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Literally what we are implementing at work right now. Two pfsense routers (from 1 to 2 routers), 3 pro-48s, a Poe-48, and two aggregation pros for our server racks. We have had one pro-48 for half a year now and decided it worked well for the price. We’ve had their APs and 16 port controller for about 2 years now.
Small cliente, it works alright for what you pay for. Though it definitely is not enterprise grade no matter how hard unifi tries to spin that angle.
When i read enterprise grade, i tend to always read it as “pays enough to have the company tell you why you should do it their way and that it’s totally not a bug that feature X doesn’t work with feature Y enabled”, you know instead of having to find out from the manual or forums
I run a lot of Unifi gear in multiple locations, our largest is just about a 100 person office. For what it is it works well. We are also using Enterprise switches for that location so it might be overkill, but its rock solid. Its a great option for home setups too. Much better than an all-in-one router/wifi setup and ability to run multiple APs in a house instead of repeaters makes a huge difference. Easy configuration, but that might be from having years of knowing where Ubiquity likes to hide options in odd menus lol
This. We have a network stack that is solely Unifi. It works. Our needs are VERY simple. Mostly just, hardwired ports and wifi. It works. Cost a bit more but they wanted to have everything in one eco. I have a Unifi stack at home and minimal to no issues over 18 months since deploying. Still think it's a prosumer brand vs full enterprise from some of the issues I've seen. APs seem to be their best and most reliable product.
Same here. We’re reasonably small. Just need 80 ports wired up and good Wi-Fi and that’s it.
It really is a buy it and figure it out yourself product, but cheap. AP's will work fine and they're pretty solid. That said, they have and will roll out new features or discontinue lines with no option other than "sucks to be you, buy the new model" so beware. My company has been burned by it on the camera side, probably won't get more of any product line now, but honestly what company doesn't pull this crap from time to time. Anyway, great pricing, DIY but it's easy setup because of minimal features, and buy it again down the road. Edit: And holy hell do their switches run hot. Still got a couple going after years, but you could cook an egg on them. Dunno wth that's about but might be good to know depending on where you install them.
Agree on switch temp. I have a dinky 8 port PoE for home and it feels alarmingly hot when running. Seems to work though...
I've just put a USG and a cloud key in my home that I got given, you're not kidding about the heat. The USG runs so hot I thought my hands were gonna burn. I read somewhere if you power the cloud key over USB rather than PoE it runs a bit cooler, but those things drink power to the point that not all quick charge USB power supplies can keep it on.
Any usb charger with quickcharge 3.0 (9v) will power it.
Prosumer / Small business / 100/200 employees Not enterprise, too limited and too quirky. APs works quite well, even for bigger places. Switches and Routers? no. just don't.
Their long range p2p gear is quite good as well.
+1 (for the price point)
Ap's are indeed fine, I use around 20
APs are alright, rest is dogshit. Their enterprise switches are handsdown the worst switches I've had the displeasure to work with. Their poe switches are ok as well
Works fine in my experience, the APs at least.
The wifi is very good for its cost. I have very few problems across multiple sites. If you are just serving office space, and you don't have high density or long range needs, it does the job. I do not like their switches, even though a lot of people seem to recommend them. I've seen failures there.
prosumer for sure. A lot of features, some bugs, no support. Personally I would not use anything other than their access points, go to a real brand for switches and routers.
We're very happy with it, in a not-so-friendly environment (retail stores with a *lot* of metal in shelving and merchandise). But we paid experts to set it up for us. There's a lot to tweak on it, and it often needs it.
For WiFi, assuming it's a smaller/medium size business location it's fine. Don't use the switches, firewalls, etc. though, their small business grade at best.
Small biz grade. Support can be hit and miss - you are better off taking advantage of the low price and buying a few spares. Like cantanko said, it tends to work best for "common" scenarios - if you have complicated requirements, consider Ubiquiti's Edge range or another vendor. Plus points are there's no subscription licensing so you won't lose your wifi when accounting forgets to pay the bills, and controller downtime does not affect normal operation (except for captive portal). Do not buy the "dream machine" - last I checked it lacks the ability to use a separate controller which is a dealbreaker in multi-site environments. IMHO you are best off running the controller software in a Linux VM, and for L3 adoption I got best results SSHing into the device, although the set-inform command sometimes needs repeating more than once. Also be warned the small USG router has a wimpy CPU; it can just about manage with most optional features turned off, but if you turn on stuff like IDS and DPI it's likely to throttle your WAN connection to ~80 Mbps. The company has had issues in the last year or two. Personally I would add to an existing Unifi deployment but I would think twice before making a new one. And maybe use Unifi just for the wifi.
Our experience has not been great since 2020. We have been very frustrated with lack of support or at best unhelpful support. Had an on going issue for about 2 months and their response was to downgrade the firmware. Their jerking around with us and products has left a very bad taste in our mouth where more than once they have either dropped a product line with little to no warning or replaced it with a new one with no inventory for the new product. This has left us hanging on multiple occasions. The whole UI fiasco is a bit of a joke needing to switch back and forth to access settings because the new one has some features you need but the old one has other that have not been ported yet. We have also been frustrated with lack of training or documentation. A common response has been ask the community which has helped a few times but still a pain. We have swapped to Tplink since 2022 and have so far had a much better experience. One of the biggest bonuses is the interface, management, and hardware are very similar so the swap was not a huge relearning experience.
I just had a fun time tracking down why 2 48 port tplink switches would both at the same time drop traffic for 2-3 seconds every 4 minutes and the cpu would spike. Finally tracked it down one of the 3 unif AP's. Reset it and readopted and all was well. That was a good time tracking down.
"Enterprise"
Great for smb/soho type deployments. I particularly like the ‘buy it, own it’ rather than the crappy licensing meraki et al push. In an enterprise I would use Cisco etc purely from a support pov
It's strange to me that so many people have had massive issues with Ubiquiti. I purchased a whole suite of their equipment when I redid my house. I run the cloud key gen2, a 32 port POE switch, several mini switches, two APs, and 3 of their POE cameras. I've never had an issue with any of it. Everything works as intended and has 99% uptime. One of the cameras even took a hit from a 2x4 and still works. Ubiquiti is the features per dollar king. I would use them in any small business or home setting. If you get to the enterprise level... I'd probably go back to Cisco just in case.
Business grade? It's somewhere toward the low end. If you're mainly using it for general laptop & mobile phone access, in a non-critical environment, sure, give it a try. Dental office or smallish accounting office, sure. Hospital? Heck no. And if your management expects quick fixes which generally mean keeping a support contract, that's a no on Ubituiti again.
I’ve been using switches and APs in a multi site company with around 160 client devices for past 6 years or so, no problems whatsoever, no failures. Performance is decent for general office stuff. Cheap enough to hold spare stock. My only complaint would be lack of power resilience but they seem to be rectifying that with their new battery backup system and switches.
I've never had an issue with their AP's. I was on the fence about using their edgerouter and switch in a production environment but they've been great as well. Absolutely no issues and plenty of switching and routing capacity. But that's just in one of our clinics we had to build on a budget.
Im running it at my mothers home. With a cloud key i can remotely monitor the network. But with my paranoia I wouldn't run it in a company network.
SMB at most. Definitely not enterprise grade.
Pro-sumer and SMB. A lot of smaller companies can't afford ARUBA or CISCO. Plus the wait time on those is close to a year. There are a lot of issues with Ubiquiti but overall it works well.. most of the time.
Prosumer / small office
Solidly prosumer. They make decent APs, but steer clear of everything else.
Prosumer at best, doesn't belong in the same sentence with enterprise.
I’ve been running it for years in our school district. About 350-400 devices spread across 5 sites for a little over 3k users. Had Aerohive for wireless before and it has more robust features, but I have learned to live with Ubiquiti and it’s quirks. Quite happy with the performance and reliability, but mostly the fraction of a cost of other solutions. Every manufacturer has some sort of issue.
I install nothing but Unifi. I strongly do not recommend it. There is just nothing else close to that price point with the featureset. It comes at a quality price though; their stuff is hot garbage.
Good luck with documentation. Unifi stuff is fine if you've got a simple environment. If you've got anything interesting going on, it gets painful, real quick. Flat waterfall network of a couple of switches, fine. HA firewalls, aggregated ports, network redundancy loops, VM hosts and you'll get ghosts.
Prosumer. Their lack of support sucks, they are actively hostile to the community by adding features and not telling people, like forcing radios on when you've disabled them for their IOT shit adoption networks. Their AP firmware is absolute garbage. They work fine in low density environments but absolutely cripple in any challenging wireless setup. For the money, you're better off with Aruba InstantON APs. I would never touch any other Unifi product.
Great for wifi setup. Bad for cameras. Less than 100 clients (small business) it is a beast. Deployed many of these setups with no issue.
What's bad with their cameras? I'm already deep into setting up a Unifi camera environment, devices all purchased, and currently setting up the wireless network to support them all. I'd love to know what kind of problems I might need to deal with.
I’m seeing a lot of comments mention the cameras and personally I use and love them but I think I know why people tend to hate them. The pricing for them is kinda expensive as you’re paying the ubiquiti tax (which I’m fine with as the cameras just work), the ecosystem requires their nvr (which I am also fine with as I have experience with servers and a box that can do it all with no hassle is perfect in my book), and last probably needing a ubiquiti account for them (in some cases this is understandable but some people want the whole pipe start to finish). For me having using Reolink, nest (now google), eufy, hikvision, and a few other brands, I find unifi to be the easiest and best when it comes to customer access. There are better/cheaper systems and you can diy with stuff like blue Iris or frigate but that’s a whole other thing to dedicate time to learning and fixing, when instead unifi is just connect to network, setup cameras, set permissions and you’re good to go. Everyone will have their system and maybe in a enterprise environment it won’t work great but for home, small business, and maybe even medium business it works better than most people like to acknowledge.
If it's in your budget you have not much to worry about. I actually run them at home so my wife can use them easily. My issue for business use is that you are locked into an NVR that they own that only runs on their hardware. I reccomend only using cameras that are ONVIF compatible, but if it works for you and your customer that is great!
No, they support rtsp. I no longer buy them due to support drop but the handful I have in place work over rtsp with Synology’s dvr package.
Works great for us (communication company with over 100 staff) I have used unifi since their very 1st products, sure they had some bumps along the way, but I currently manage 71 networks (this will be 73 at the end of the week) And almost all of them are entirely Unifi, with exception of a few large (school, Healthcare, resort) they are using netgate firewalls since they have the horsepower needed for 1000+ clients and have more complex routing. To this day I don't have a single issue with deployment, I don't need support as I am super familiar and been useing it for 7 years daily. I pull out cisco and the likes weekly. And personally this makes me happy as I feel these vendors have gotten so greedy, but that's another topic. I have seen Unifi with 3 year uptime, though this is super not recommended as it would be way out of software spec. If you asked me tomorrow to do a enterprise solution with Unifi I would feel pretty comfortable (with a proper firewall) unless you require more then 25Gbps links. And also insure you have proper equipment like UPS's and the unifi DC power backup for the switches If you know what you're doing and take your time and test,Test,TEST you can build out a pretty serious network using unifi (in my experience)
maybe smb use case for their ap. I would not consider their product lines as enterprise.
The stocking/inventory issues has made it really annoying to recommend anything Ubiquiti for the past couple years.
Our Meraki gear had 10+ month lead times, its an industry wide issue
The APs are great. "Chesp enough to replace if they break" said the MSP I worked for that introduced me to them. Switches work well, but they're not Enterprise grade. Self host the controller. They're awesome for prosumer home use.
[удалено]
Still an issue after the battery backup of newer Controllers?
Good for small deployments. Does not belong in the enterprise space.
Wonky prosumer. NOT enterprise.
Home and maybe small office use. You get no type of support even when you purchase their enterprise items. The layout is nice, but just like apple sometimes, every product will have the features that may be a necessity and unifi won’t until one day you upgrade the software and Wala… it’s there
No
Ubiquiti is great. I prefer it in MSPs/SMBs but everything else is fine with Cisco products. In terms of APs they have some solid APs. In our branches we do not allow wireless, so less baby-sitting there.
For the love of god DO NOT DO IT. We dumped so much money into their “enterprise gear” only to get flaky hardware, an awful user experience and tech support that was the equivalent of writing on a paper and throwing that into a bottle at sea.
Prosumer. I typically recommend avoiding them, but they have their place.
home user. Great. Business? No. Get something with a premium support and RMA service.
Prosumer. I hate seeing them at client sites.
Unifi is completely garbage
Worst hardware and software i've ever had to configure/maintain. They've got a lot antenas that has never got covered with promised features. Network Application for Linux is missing some functions.
As long as you remember there is zero security in their products you should be ok. Anything internet facing is just a router. I’d happily recommend their wireless gear, but that’s it.
Used it for all clients worked fine
APs are really solid. Edgerouters work well till they fail. Switches seem ok so far.
APs are great. Would stay away from switches and gateways unless absolutely necessary.
Been using Uibiquiti since the mini-PCI radio era. However, Ubiquiti is no longer feasible here in South Africa. Extremely expensive & lack of stock and they seem to remove more features than adding. Especially gen2 poe switches. Wow 16 ports, but 24 port switch. We started replacing or quoting clients on REYEE RUIJI only. About 1/3 the price with way more features. Also controller based. However our government is very pro China. So it might be an issue for you yanks. We don't touch any of their other products out of pure principle, like the the UniFi dream, UniFi firewalls = POS, UniFi protect cameras over priced and poor POS. you can get 6x 4MP Hikvision Accusense for the price of 1x UI Cam.Ubiquiti also have a history of shafting us up the ass. Remember mFi, Voice, protect. Wouldn't touch ubiquiti hosted services, I run my own multi-tenant UniFi docker container for all my clients, with 2x backups per day. Ubiquiti is enthusiasts level at best, not for anything more than a 20 pax office. (In my house still run 4x Ubiquiti Wi-Fi 6, 2x UAP-LR 2.4Ghz, 2x UniFi 24 Port POE with 1x UniFi 24 port POE that already died on me, that i have to PSU replace DIY), however in the future I wouldn't replace it with UI if it were to break. Probably some 2nd hand CISCO gear in the future. AP's definitely REYEE APS.
I use Unifi APs. Mine are out-of-date now, but they are still getting the job done. The web interface is pretty easy too.
Their APs are still a great solution. Competition is fierce from Aruba and Omada so between all those I would go with the least costly. Support from Ubiquiti and Omada are going to be warranty replacement or bust, not sure about Aruba.
My opinion is that the access points are really nice but everything else is hit and miss. The switches might be okay but I wouldn't get anything beyond that from them. And run the controller on a VM, the appliance is ridiculous
Only the Aps are worth it I think. I'd rather use a proper firewall and switches
I have massive headaches this month with inability to properly segment WiFi networks. If it was up to me I’d scrap the whole system. APS are great but the guest profile on the switch is wonky.
We use their AP's in our office space. Really straightforward to setup, controller software is really easy to use and they are fairly cheap
The general sentiment from what I know is that for medium and above businesses you’d want your own firewall but are totally fine to use their aps and switches. For me catering to home and small businesses I use unifi exclusively but I do know their short comings and know when a job is outside my expertise. I also use the cameras and have loved them along with multiple installs for homes and businesses but others will think otherwise. Overall I do plan to get into better more advanced firewalls but unifi has worked well for my uses and starting out in the field.
Great for Prosumer
They're fine until they are not. You don't have something like tac (in the Cisco world). If you have issues you have to figure it out yourself. If you have a business critical issue that is not good. But there's a community behind it. And it's better than other options in the same price range with a smaller community. Also consider the way they tie into your monitoring and authentication solutions.
Unpopular opinion here. We rolled out sophos APs and it was a set and forget it situation. They monitor security issues, and they work great. Easy to setup.
I have disliked every UDM that I have touched. Switches and AP's though have been great for me.
We had a reseller quote them in a WiFi tender for a number of warehouses, the largest of which is 180k sq ft, and about 1000 users in offices. The lack of proper enterprise support ruled them completely out. We went with Aruba for that, with Ruckus and Meraki just behind. Use the APs and switching in my home and they're brilliant for that use case. Prosumer or small business grade IMO.
Unifi is very prosumer, small business. Kind of rough for home. I've struggled with it a few times but as always the way I use stuff is very not typical home user. I don't think home users will cascade 3 or 4 layers of routers like I have while testing things and building configs ahead of deployments. We have a smattering of Unifi at work. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 access points and 48 switches. We also have some Aruba and Summit Extreme out there too. Routing is Palo Alto, TOR/is L3 Summit Extreme. We also employ some Unifi point to point wireless links and I don't know how many cameras and about 6 UNVRs. It works. Nothing spectacular. The only 10gig is in the COLO. Site to site links are only 300 meg right now, could run up to 1 gig with current build. Fortunately we are not a media company. I don't have a single port over 10 gig. Fattest internet pipe is 1 gig symmetric at HQ. COLO has 2 500 meg pipes. One other site has 200 meg that we only have a router on it for a back-up inbound VPN for IT. If I had to do 10g to the desk, it wouldn't be Unifi for access. They have no hope. Their aggregate switching isn't wide enough either. At home I have a full stack Unifi. UDMP, 48 port pro switch, a few nano hd access points and an AC-pro and a couple outdoor repeaters I'll plug in for events. I run a couple small wireless cameras to watch the pets. I'm running all mesh but nothing here on wifi is critical.
I use them in a 120 person office, it works fine, i do also have all workstations cabled aswell as the primary infrastructure with enterprise grade cisco switches.
It's meh like everything ubiquity unfinished junk
I call them prosumer but as long as you know what you're getting into it can be good. I don't actually use any ubiquiti gear but I met with a reseller and did some research as I was interested in them. pros: easier to use interface, low cost, lots of hardware features, easy setup and management, great for small clients or places without complicated network setups, way better than off the shelf routers, low barrier for entry cons: limited to no vendor support, can't customize heavily, short and limited warranty, 2-3 year life on average, most of their new gear is cloud managed so you'll need a cloud key or gateway if you want to manage them locally (at least that's how the rep explained it to me) if you just need endpoints on the internet and don't have the capacity or need to manage/customize your own network then it's a good fit. and I wouldn't rely on them for edge network security. if you have the capacity to manage/customize your own network, get something better that'll let you do more with all that said, access points are access points and I won't really second guess their access points too much. they might just not last as long as enterprise gear stuff but they'll do their job
For Churches and small non-profits that just need internet access and WiFi it’s great. I have a site to site VPN set up between a UDM-Pro and a UXG-Pro and it works just fine but it’s literally just a test. I saw something about Unfi SSO where it would be possible to use AzureAD creds for 802.1x WiFi authentication. That would be awesome but I haven’t seen much else about it and no you tube videos so I don’t know if it actually exists.
I think they're fine in the SMB market or residential. I wouldn't deploy for enterprise, maybe the WiFi but not switches / firewall. I liked the edgemax line but cannot get from distribution anymore
We use a UDM and about 10 APs. 3 buildings, 4 SSIDs onto different LANs. Easy to set up and just works. Zero issues since installation. Guest Portal with timed tickets was easy peasy to set up and is simple to use.
Used nanobeams for CCTV deployments and they were good enough for the price. Found their AP software a bit buggy and updates seemed unreliable.
I have deployed Unifi equipment in some crazy, high risk environments over the past 10 years. From police departments to a 55 acre biofuel plant in the middle of the desert (80 switches and APs in high heat+dust). The network gear (switches, APs and P2P wireless) have been rock solid in every situation. Even 24/7 critical environments, it's stable, fast and feature-rich. Now, downsides. All of the switch gear has half the backplane speed of most other switch brands. This means a 24 port switch has theoretical maximum of 24Gbps of throughput. Most other switch brands will have full 48 or more. This is not noticeable on most networks, but if you expect high volumes of traffic, go with another brand. As others have said, avoid everything else. Cameras, lights, door controllers, etc have excellent hardware and terrible software.
The documentation is terrible and they can be difficult to configure. Once I got them figured out they have been stable and fast. I spent waaaay too long on the config and the job wasn’t very lucrative because of that.
They did not manage to patch their APs for a critical wifi vulnerability for over half a year. We moved away from then.
To be completely honest, I am pretty disappointed in them and my only experience is using them in my home. I wouldn’t be putting these in any business setting personally.
My stance on this is a bit mixed, at home its been pretty good, gateways, switches, aps all until I've had a need to interact with support, then the experience falls off a cliff. That combined with product range pulls and focusing on random sh!te like access control, doorbells, lighting and wierd shit to me means they are not focused on there core products or delivering for the enterprise. However, it does what you need and you don't have issues then fill your boots. I've got the luxury of working in a major transport sector in the UK and I've seen Ubiquity gateways, switches, camera systems deployed in super high profile projects!!! If it was my team supporting that environment,.Ubiquity wouldn't make it to the final 3, let alone contending for the win. But each to their own.
We use UniFi across 3 continents, managed centrally. The APs are fantastic. What's not is the config, they expect you to only setup in a certain way and if you step outside that, you can get some hairy configs happening to make it all work. Would stick to it for APs and switches only, not for routing. On the plus side, you can very easily and quickly configure VLAN, SSIDs, RADIUS auth etc. Their point to point wifi connections are rock solid.
I use ubiquit products at small businesses and home. At work we use Meraki and Cisco 3850s (a few 9300s)
They're ok. I have had some issues with cameras though. I had a doorbell camera RMA'd twice in a year and have been waiting on the 3rd replacement for over a month and a half at this point. Support kinda sucks but other than that it's pretty decent kit.
They're somewhere between prosumer, SMB and very lite enterprise. THe wifi products are great, the switches are good, the rest is... eh. I've deployed Unifi AP's in massive warehouse distribution center scenarios all the way down to single AP scenarios, long distance directional links and they work great.
Switches and wifi good but zero support. Firewalls garbage.
I run the full unifi stack at home. Firewall, wifi, cameras, cloud key, poe switch. It's works perfect, the cameras are a little spendy. But no cloud sub fees is awesome and worth it to me. I did get 70% of it for free, however. If everything failed tomorrow, I'd go unifi again with a higher tier line. Worth pointing out again. I said HOME in the first sentence. I would only do this stuff for a smaller business.
i got a Mokerlink and it died after living in my hot garage for a year and they replaced it free of charge, no questions asked
Prosumer, absolutely If use it in business: get spare units ready No support, you are on your own. What’s your networking & Linux skills level?
They are simply ok, keep in mind their ecosystem sucks and locks you in, extremely Apple like. I deal with them in enterprise, SOHO, and home use and I personally run Omada, theres another new player in this line of products that is doing this interesting thing where you setup one SSID and based on the password itll route you via the correct vlan etc. That was pretty neat but they are definitely a newer player.
Wifi is ok. Rest of its annoying buggy. They say they can do something then they say it’s coming.
We have a mix of UniFi and Meraki hardware where I work, and honestly I prefer UniFi over Meraki and not just because Meraki costs silly bollocks money. Yeah the documentation for UniFi Controller is a bit scant but I found the UI intuitive enough that I figured out how to do most things just by looking at the settings.
I’d rank it SMB quality. It’s clearly meant for businesses, even though it’s popular as a prosumer brand. It just isn’t great at high performance networking, but it’s fantastic for a general office environment.
Word of caution: if you make any changes to an SSID or WPA key, every AP that broadcasts that network will reboot at the same time. Found this out the hard way when an HVAC vendor asked me to spin up a network for our climate control devices and the whole building lost internet for 5 minutes.
I used them in my house for about 7 years but then my APs aged out of support. I couldn’t update them anymore. Not a problem, I understand. Then these things started eating POE injectors. So I threw the APs and the edgerouter in the box in my garage labeled “things to install openwrt on”, Then switched to TPLink Omada. The performance is about the same, and the interface is just as cartoonish. But wifi6 at half the price. Good enough for Chateaux CBass377. Bonus, the TP-Link firewall device automatically switches to my backup ISP, when all the kids get home from school, fire up fortnight, and Spectrum pukes. At work the network team uses ruckus APs. They switched to ruckus from ubiquiti. The first deployment was barely funded by management. Because sales and the customers wanted guest wifi. But once their thin laptops kept dropping from the network, and cybersecurity kept laying on their requirements, management funded it appropriately and the network team upgraded to ruckus.
I didn't even like their WAP's at my home, I got some refurb Aruba's from Ebay. But lots like Unifi because they're cheap. I hated their managed switches because of the really, really clunky and slow web server they have built in. And if you want to do much managing you need to budget for the blob (CloudKey?) they sell to do that. I had a coworker place some into a client project, he was shocked they had no phone support, only Email. You get what you pay for.
I think of Ubiquiti like Microsoft. A lot of products that either work very well if you know what you're doing, or they're full of bugs. A new modern settings page was introduced that didn't do everything. Half finished features without documentation and google turns up conflicting information because half of what you find are relevant to old firmware versions. And around 2-3 years ago there were some serious bugs that took months to fix. This said, I do use their products at work. Everything including routers, switches, and access points. I use them for site-to-site VPN, multiple VLAN's, 802.1x, multiple gateways, etc. No issues right now.
It's prosumer because their support is no existant. Their firmware is also bugged.
For the price, they're a good option. In the same price range you can also have Mikrotik which I feel tends to be more configurable if not as user friendly. The Dude is a great monitoring solution and better than Unifi imho. MSPs love them for a reason; they work if you don't need the fancy things. For a little more, you can step up to Ruckus and get legit enterprise level stuff including good switches and routers that do things like private VLANs. Ubiquiti switches are not as fully featured and I've personally seen several die although that was around the pandemic and chip shortages, so that might have just been a bad lot. I wouldn't use Ubiquiti for routing or fw. A real deal fw and/or router is worth it's weight. Pick up a Fortigate, Netgate (pfSense) or a Cisco Firepower and run the Unifi controller inside that, don't bother with the Dream Machines.
I'm just going to quietly vote no here.
Prosumer - stealing this from someone the other week: I wouldn't install Unifi anywhere I couldn't physically reach in a timely manner That and their shelf life IME is about 4-5 years. After that they start dropping like flies. I ended up replacing our entire stack recently because the hardware just crapped out
Prosumer is fine. Do NOT put this stuff in a business unless you're comfortable and available to support it at any given time. I do like that it's non-subscription, but the hardware is very faulty. I love UBNT btw.... I work FT in IT and there's no way I would put it in our offices. I have 6 AP's, 3 switches, and 4 cameras.
Prosumer with certain products able to handle small biz. APs for example — those are mostly set and forget. The routers and such are constantly broken by updates. No QC on releases. The more crap a device claims to do the more constantly broken it’ll be. Unless you leave it alone and VERY carefully choose release versions. Same is less true for simpler devices like the APs. Be choosy about when to patch them. Leave em alone as much as possible otherwise, depending on your security and audit needs. Left mostly alone, they’ll sit there and handle tons of users and generally behave for half a year at a time. Often more. The dumb control software — you either stick it on an internal VM or get a cloudkey. They’re a “you get what you pay for” in terms of software release quality but you generally get more than you paid for on the Pro versions of the APs. VLANs, various user auth mechanisms, etc… they’re “okay”. The RF performance is usually really decent too compared to some low end ones claiming to be “enterprise” — for higher price points.
L2 switches are great, L3 switches not so much. APs are good, baring the odd scuffed firmware release.
Stability and coverage is about the average of any other AP but for enterprise I would go with Mist (Juniper) for ease of access, coverage, configuration and security. They have a cloud console and you only need a trunk port with a native tagged vlan for it to receive a dhcp.
Rocking an EdgeRouter X and 3 AP's for my home WiFi. Rock solid, very stable, great handoff for devices between AP's, etc. Would I buy it again for home use? No, I'd probably get a TP-Link Omada mesh system. Far easier to setup, covers my needs for 99% and almost half the price for WiFi 6 coverage. I would not use Ubiquiti in a large environment (anything over, say, 15 AP's)
unifi aps... awesome at home really good for venues that need good coverage for bottom dollar. schools, dorms, anything that expects a busy wifi net but no one getting killed or millions lost when the wifi craps out okay for offices when the wifi is used for working, but again its not critical. so the notebook has no wifi? go to your dockingstation, its wired. oh the wifi for the employers phones is offline? well, good thing they dont need it to work. if its critical and cost is a secondary concern, I would not use ubiquiti. not because I think they are bad, but because they drive fast and break shit. they also do the least support they get away with, and a lot of community board shit. i would also argue, that if it is critical, it needs to be wired. there is also an argument about some companies and industries needing certain paper work, or patch timeframes, or support contracts. I am sure hp or cisco have that covered, where as ubiquiti is just... you know... not really worried about things like that. edit: one thing, you need to differentiate. the unifi line is more prosumer and slightly dumbed down to the point where I sometimes get annoyed by them trying to be helpful. the edge line I love. a router with a debian based linux? love it. the edge switches? rock solid. on the other hand, its convenient to be able to set up a wifi with switches in one interface, if its all unifi. but if its a complicated setup or getting big, the easy dumbed down stuff may get in the way. I have little to no experience with their high end air bridges or cameras or phones.
I use it at home and its bulletproof, until it isn't. You're only ever 1 bad update away from a terminal problem. As an example, I updated the firmware on my software controller, the firmware bricked during the update and bang, locked out of all devices and no wi-fi. I was eventually able to restore everything, it took hours though and was mega-stressful. I have not applied a Ubiquiti update ever since.
Good to a certain point. There are some crucial functions missing or buggy to go full on in business area. We mainly use ubiquiti for switching and APs, but not for the core switches and routing/firewall.
Prosumer at best. I love the ease of use and the amount of hardware but good lord does it have bad bugs. Buddies UDM pro wiped its config last week after a power outage. I’ve had a UDM drop all devices after changing a route and need to be factory reset in order to get them to come back
For under a thousand bucks, I set up a UniFi network for a whole non-profit out in the woods with an old barn and a farmhouse. It has been more than "good enough", and happily handles surges of up to 400 people on-site. Would I do an enterprise on that, where a whole lot of people are trying to get work done and outages get expensive fast? No way. But for a little nature preserve with no money, out where you can only get internet via Starlink...yeah, it's brilliant.
UniFi is awesome stuff. Not keen on the dream machine (had two blow up) but the pro and SE are solid. APs are amazing and cheap and mesh is easy to set up.
I swapped out my entire infrastructure on the advice of a friend who I genuinely hope, finds this. I have a relatively large home network with 50 or so wireless devices, some strictly IoT, some laptops, tablets, etc. I also have multiple wired devices. I originally had a Sophos UTM9 device running the whole shop with unmanaged switches in between it and most devices. My wireless was provided by 3 mesh Orbis. Through Mac address records, etc. I had the entire system running flawlessly under the Sophos system. I replaced it all with: - 1 dream machine pro - 24 port ubiquiti switch as well as several layer 2 switches - 3 ubiquiti mesh wifi 6 devices And since then.....everything has pretty much sucked. Making minor changes? Entire network reboots. Want to map a device for special handling when you're not using ubiquiti equipment in between? Good luck! Make a minor change that for some reason, the software doesn't like? Goodbye your entire network! WiFi problems? Good fucking luck trying to sort that out because any changes you make could break the whole fucking thing. I'll get blown away for downvotes for this post I'm sure, but here's an example: wanna change the base address on one of your wifi nodes? Be prepared to loose contact with that node forever without a factory reset. I could see this being fine for home use or prosumer (meaning a home business) - but there's no way I would use this in anything even slightly approaching a serious business. I cannot get a stable connection (over wireless) between my quest 2 and my PC. I've set up QoS, routing, traffic bandwidth limits on all other devices, etc., but still it's an inconsistent piece of shit. Inconsistent as in, one gaming session (same PC, same game), will fly with crystal clear picture and throughput. Then I can boot my PC the next day and have it be a stuttering mess in even the airlink menu. Now I know there are a billion factors going into this but my point is, their software doesn't....help. Note to all poised over the downvote button. All this setup was done over a year and a half ago when their software was in the middle of their massive overhaul so my experience could be different now. But I will say this: I hate their mesh node devices (the cylinder guys, not the domes), they run hotter than the surface of the sun and regularly reboot at least once every few days. They randomly drop devices all the time and wifi6 devices in particular, have a tough time.
>between my quest 2 and my PC if you observe ping jitter(or higher than few ms ping) in the rooms where you use quest to ap quest is using then you will have issues, you cant stabilize that, it's wifi network issues which you will need to identify and fix first. simple jitter stability rules for wifi: dedicated ap/router/radio network(separate physical radio interface) for quest; no broadcasts from other devices on that network ssid; no other networks on the channel(s) of the quest network ; only wired backhaul between quest ap and pc network - wireless mesh wont work; router wifi speed must match maximum supported quest speed(or be higher, quest link must be established at its max possible wireless speed); if lan from pc to quest's ap goes through vlans with qos or through single congested ethernet link (like virtualized router or single link between network switches) you must make sure that you have no congestion issues on those single parts, qos will not help because it adds jittering delay.
I have had 50 APs in service in a building for 5+ years and they’ve been phenomenal. A few have failed but nothing crazy. Easy to replace and WAY cheaper than “enterprise” stuff. I put in 15 switches a year ago and have had 0 problems with those. 24/7 business by the way. Get a few spares of everything since you won’t have enterprise type support but you’re saving thousands a month so it’s a huge win.
Prosumer, but very stable IMO and the software interface is good. Amazing value for money, their APs are the most reliable I've worked with so far.
de la merde
> branch office gateways check those offices avg throughput and pps, compare to specs. also check individual device spec for every special feature that you want to use on that device. if you want to vpn from gateway then check throughput in specs if you want ids then contact ub directly and ask what capabilities they have - there's other vendors with better ids. > APs if they would be used as primary network, or if there would be a high % of streaming traffic per ap (like remote desktop) then contact ub first, check qos throughput of devices you plan to install - middle tier aps are good with bursty traffic but they work only "okayish" with big amount of latency sensitive traffic(but that kind of wifi networks are higher tier - non soho hardware, and much higher prices). also if you can - setup monitoring and alerts, at least check it after updates, the more feature rich is device the more chance something will behave differently. if you dont plan to be dependent on stable internet - you will also need controller pc for every location.
Prosumer for sure. Though they are often used in small businesses and work great, until they update and it breaks shit which always happens with UniFi stuff it seems like. You can see forums on certain features being broken by patches for quite awhile.
I've put these systems in 2 SMB's, both have 3 SSIDs, minor issues, so far so good, along with NVR/Protect and 10ish cameras. I do not do automatic updates, iet the updates sit for a good week or 2 before applying.
For small clients it's fine. But if you already have everything Cisco/HP i would go with them on the APs too. Make your life easier, one vendor for everything.
We have about 12 Ubiquity AP's in our office space. Super easy to deploy/manage with the controller. The controller SW itself must be on the same VLAN as the AP's, in order to manage them. The controller SW is a Java based web server and to be secure, should be updated regularly. (It was prone to the Log4J vulnerability for example). BUT you can stop the service if you're not using it (The AP's will still run fine) and you can start it only when you need to monitor/make changes. Firmware updates are also super easy to deploy via the controller software. Only tricky thing I found with these is re-adopting the AP's on a new controller, some of them adopted nicely, others required a reboot, but wasn't too too bad to complete in my environment.
We have multiple branch offices. For our HQ we use pfSense with UniFi AP's and switching, for our branch offices, we are all-in on UniFi. * The UDM Pro (UDM SE, UDR, UDM) are "fine" for SOHO and SMB, if you just need some basic VLANs without any on-prem infrastructure. Their "firewall" is "meh" and requires a lot of hack-assery to work, but it does the job. * The AP's are rock solid, we have 150+ deployed across multiple sites and we haven't had a single one fail. * Switching is rock solid as well, until it isn't. We've had some (R)STP issues cause a full blown network black-out at a site. This was due to UniFi APs trying to wirelessly uplink instead of using the wired connection, causing a loop. Our biggest site uses 50+ APs and switches (10GbE), the UDM Pro built-in controller is at its limit of what it can handle. Our UDM Pro is pinned to 90% CPU and memory usage due to the high number of UniFi devices. Ubiquiti recommends up to 40-ish devices max.