They had good products for a long time, but it's gone very downhill in the past few years (lots of internet stories about why this is happening).

I've had enough bad experiences that i recently moved my routing/IDS to a dedicated box and am slowly moving away from their switches.

No reasonable replacements i've found for their APs yet though (Meraki is too expensive).

You have any links to those stories? Would be interesting.

Personally I hate the way they're going towards cloud accounts and dedicated management boxes. We used to be able to just install a docker to manage everything but the latest hardware ranges (eg their video offering) require dedicated management hardware. They're also pretty slow with uptake on new standards like WiFi 6 and now 6E.

The ideal selling point of ubiquiti was self-managed near-enterprise quality hardware with free self-hosted management and decent hardware prices.

I can't fully blame them because I know venture capital idealises subscription pricing and data mining right now but it won't work for me and it's annoying having to look for another option again when I'm invested in their ecosystem.

But anyway it would be interesting to read more about what's going on behind the scenes.

"Gotchanomics" is such a shitty model - you get something valuable, begin to trust the vendor, establish a system with their equipment, and then they pull a bait and switch, trying to get away with shitty service, mediocre replacements for good products, moving services to the cloud and subscription based nonsense - Nickel&Dime As A Service.

If I'm faced with paying premium rates, I'm going with Cisco and premium vendors. Ubiquiti's value was good equipment at reasonable prices to the point that you could buy spares for reliability and save 90% of the cost of service contracts from premium vendors. That differential was the absolute wrong space for them to try to tap for more profit, because nothing else was special about the brand. Cheap, decent, "good enough" network gear is now a market available for exploitation, ubiquiti has lost it.

> "Gotchanomics" is such a shitty model - you get something valuable, begin to trust the vendor, establish a system with their equipment, and then they pull a bait and switch, trying to get away with shitty service, mediocre replacements for good products, moving services to the cloud and subscription based nonsense - Nickel&Dime As A Service.

Exactly, well put.

For what it's worth, as I have been bitten by this practice of "gotchanomics" too many times that I've become a bit sensitive to any signs pointing to it.

I'm not 100% sure Unifi is doing this with their existing products, but new ranges like the video stuff require a modern management box which in turn requires a cloud account as far as I've heard. I've decided not to buy those for this reason. But it undermines my confidence in buying new gear for the ecosystem because it really feels like this will be the next step.

Like for example i have switches that get confused and started reporting things are connected to ports 57-62 (on a 24 port switch) and switching them wrong, etc.

UI they have been slowly screwing up more and more for years (How many years are they into the "new UI" migration for the controller?).

But the actual switching is pretty basic stuff (and a separate hardware chip they are driving that is not hard to drive), and simply shouldn't be going wrong in this way.

I've also got a UDM-SE and UDM-Pro that seem to have hardware issues on the SFP+ uplink when connected in certain ways (and won't break 500mbps upstream) no matter what SFP+ module is connected (fiber, dac, etc) if the LAN SFP+ port is connected at 10gbps. All the same modules work in every other router (mikrotik, etc) connected the exact same way. (yes, before HN tries to debug this, IDS/etc is all turned off. There are no nft rules, no nothing, i have debugged this to death through the actual shell). Others have had the same issue.

They also have an $1800 ptz camera that can't follow objects even when it detects them (This is 100% basic functionality of a PTZ camera, especially at this pricepoint), despite promising it for years.

I have lots of these kinds of "why is basic functionality broken or missing" stories. Ubiquiti gets it out the door, says they'll fix it all in post, and moves on to the next thing.

They aren't a hardware manufacturer, they are a bad AAA game developer :)

Can confirm, same issues with SFP+ on my UDM-Pro. The software updates for this thing have been so bad the last year, incredibly buggy, it's infuriating.

My current favorite was the update to the AP Pro APs that broke everything if you were using a wireless uplink (I was using one to bridge a semi-decent signal to my garage). Clients connected to that AP had zero connectivity to anything else, despite the Controller saying "all good!"

Gee... I'm glad I walked away from it. I was about to go for UDM-Pro when updating my home network devices. Then I read some HN saying they were putting ads to the console pages. But that wasn't really about product itself. What you mentioned were really really serious product issues in areas I suppose almost every other vendors are rock solid.

> ...venture capital idealises subscription pricing right now...

Pera owns ~91% of the company, it all comes from the top.

If you've set up a local-only controller, avoiding cloud nags, and poked around via SSH on their boxes, you'll realize it's nice, solid, hardware but the adoption process is a brittle and buggy mess. The controller is Java and Mongodb and picky to install but fortunately someone is making dockerfiles for it.

I think it's still an okay value but you need to watch your flanks.

You can still use their products without a dedicated box or cloud accounts by running the UnifFi admin console in your own network. Can you clarify what you mean?

All of my wireless gear and most of my switching is UniFi running against a self-hosted controller without cloud access. This works fine.

However, UniFi Protect is hardware only. You have to have either a UDM, a CloudKey Gen2 Plus, or a UNVR. I bought into Protect a couple years ago and now I'm sort of stuck with it. I _think_ that I could de-provision the cameras from my UNVR and use them standalone with BlueIris or Frigate but I've heard stories that they gimp the RTSP resolution on the G4 Pro camera (of which I have three).

I understand that the UDM range of products can no longer be set up without a cloud account, and none of the video products can he hosted locally.

I was thinking of a newer gateway as the USG is too slow to do decent IDS. And the video for my home.. But I didn't buy either for this reason. I looked at it about 2 years ago.

It feels like they want to do the same with the older network gear but they just won't because there will be too much backlash from the move.

They don't necessarily promote their self-hosting software method of Unifi management, and they outright removed support for Unifi Protect unless you buy hardware.

Want your surveillance video to be cloud-hosted or on your own pre-existing RAID? Pound sand!

Aruba has some 'instant on' units which might be a decent replacement but I don't have nearly enough experience with them to say for sure.

https://www.arubainstanton.com/products/access-points/

My employer switched from Ubiquiti to Aruba. Much, much better. Far easier to manage. The Ubiquiti APs had very little range and below-threshold subscriber loads would cause them to become unstable and require a reboot. No good when 500 employees and guests are attempting to get work done. We issue primarily laptops with only certain people getting docks for Ethernet. Quite a few people have purchased the Anker USB-C dongle docks from Amazon and use their IP phone's secondary Ethernet port for a connection if they want a solid Ethernet connection.

At home I'm happy with Google WiFi mesh all around my house.

Thanks for the tip on Aruba. Right now my all Ubiquiti home network is awesome because I have a docker controller image. As spoon as something goes out though, I am done with these clowns.

Wasn’t sure where to look next… note taken on Aruba

+1; exactly my case. I have a handful of Ubiquiti APs and the network is now rock solid, so my plan is to wait until WiFi6 becomes mainstream (or they mess up with updates) - and then I'm gone forever.

After they bungled reporting the hacks last year, I promised to never purchase anything from Ubiquiti again. Good to know Aruba may be an option.

My understanding is that Instant On APs drop their wifi clients when they lose internet access and that this is billed as a feature. Maybe that's changed recently.

For an Instant-on AP, that sounds … maybe useful? If I am connected from my phone? Why do you hate the feature?

My internet frequently (although less lately) stalls out for minutes at a time, once or twice a day. I don't want my AP to kick me off wireless when I'm refreshing my monitoring app waiting for internet to come back up, or for me to be locked out of my security cameras, or for wifi-only IoT things which don't talk to the internet at all to get kicked off and have to reconnect.

Oh so you want to access your network while the internet is down?

Right. Yes.

The access points are cloud managed only (I believe the switches can optionally be managed through a local webui) but very solid hardware, quite easy to set up, and probably feature rich enough for basically anyone who isn't trying to mess around with an enterprise environment at home.

Instant On has several limitations like maximum APs in a site or maximum clients. I don’t want to say they are bad products but it’s only useful for a small network.

TP-Link Omada is a very similar system like UniFi in this price range. Their Controller GUI almost looks the same as UniFi‘s.

I've only used both in home and small office settings, but I found TP-Link's Omada line of APs to be equivalent to Ubiquiti APs. Same type of hardware, same type of controller software you can run on your own machine. I don't know enough about APs to say whether the performance matches.

Ruckus Unleashed is my favorite replacement, with Aruba Instant On as runner up.

I'll take a look- thanks.

One thing i have that often limits my choices is that the ubiquiti's are recessed into my ceiling (6 AP's). I can do the drywall work, if they make the mounts :)

If I have to, I guess i can make some from scratch in solidworks, but i'd rather not.

Ruckus is not bad, but not great either. I've got a ICX 7150-C12P that worked fine until the PoE power supply failed just a few months out of warranty. I'm glad that I did not pay them for the "license" to use the SFP ports (which every other manufacturer just enables by default).

I do like their WAPs. I've got a couple of RS510 WAPs that do a great job, but initially they had some noticeable performance problems for almost a year until fixed by a firmware update.

Ruckus is pretty much the exact opposite of the price spectrum. At least you can get the older generations for less extreme prices second hand.

Is Draytek any good? I've just gotten their AX router and mesh APs / smart switch and apart from one significant bug which made the router restart every few hours if the wi-fi interface was on, it seems to be ok.

Anything I should keep in mind before I get more of this brand?

MicroTik have good wireless APs (and other devices).

You can’t beat mikrotik s routers (rOS / routerOS) and their routing hardware. I actively managed well over 500x of them. however I agree with another reply that their access points are definitely a side show for them. The unfortunate part is their interface and sw capabilities are so great that if they just put some additional effort + latest gen hardware towards their access-points they could become one of the top players in Wi-Fi. (I also manage several hundred mikrotik access points).

Ruckus is my go-to for access points/ client Wi-Fi. (I manage 1000s of ruck) Excellent hardware. Every AP they offer can have it’s firmware flashed to either fully standalone, OR centralized manage (vSZ / ZoneDirector), OR unleashed (which is AP self-managed for up to 25 local aps). Another much overlook feature of ruckus is that every function can be controlled/modified via SSH. while not as powerful as a true API, it’s still very powerful and often very overlooked.

For home use I've not had any problems with their AP hardware. But it's definitely not been stressed. I was just after something that has enterprise features but not the price. routerOS covers that soundly (almost too well as the configuration can be confusing if you don't know networking).

I use a mikrotik router, but their wireless AP's are clearly a sideshow for them.

But i am very happy with the router. I have 5gbps symmetrical internet, and it's one of the few that can handle it for real without BS.

TP-Link's Omada AP line is solid.

Do those require management via their cloud, or can they be handled entirely locally?

The APs have great options. Cloud, local controller (their hardware device, software or a docker container), or none at all. If you want to start with a single AP you don't need the manager.

I bought their largest AP, the 660, attached it to a second floor ceiling, and found it covered my whole home and much of the yard. It supports 100s of clients.

They can be handled entirely locally; the cloud management bits are optional.

(I reworked our home network to Omada gear last fall. OC200, ER605, a few managed switches, couple of EAP245 APs. Overall quite happy with it; as the person above said it's pretty much fire and forget once you get the initial setup done. Used to use -- and enjoyed -- Mikrotik but alas their wifi support/performance at least on the home front has stagnated over the past several years.)

I have a tp-link Omaha setup in my new house. I run the management interface on the LAN in docker on an old Linux box (runs pihole too). Works really well so far! I have the wifi 6 APs, a PoE switch, and a router. I have 1gig symmetrical fiber and everything is reliable and fast now. Previously I had an edgerouter-x and it was very flaky.

You can handle it locally, I do. The only feature that doesn’t work with it off is automatic firmware updates. You can still update firmware, you just have to download and upload it manually. It doesn’t even nag about setting up a cloud account.

The only thing I regret of theirs is the router (TL-R605). It’s not bad, but the VPN performance is mediocre, and I always wonder if I would’ve been happier with pfsense. Every other piece of hardware has been great.

I have installed six in a big old house (with almost a meter deep interior walls !).

I manage them with an app on a tablet connected to the same LAN, I've disabled all cloud management. That said, they are almost configure and forget, after the initial install I've only had to upgrade the firmware when I visit the site.

The controller doesn't have to be linked to their cloud.