I bought into the ecosystem while taking my networking cert classes back in 2017. They were much cheaper than Cisco gear for business-grade networking, and overall I’ve been happy with them.
Their security offerings are locally managed, and you can make local accounts, but I just bought a NAS from them and I had to sign in with my ubiquiti account first before I could make a local account, and it seems the cloud account has some privileges that you can’t give to local super admins.
So now I’m having second thoughts. I figure since it’s enterprise-grade stuff they can’t really make it cloud-dependent like you see on the consumer side since a lot of companies need air-gapped networks. On the other hand, on those occasions that I didn’t have internet access and hadn’t yet made a local-only account, I was locked out, so…
Regarding the NAS specifically, I use a TruNAS system at work and it works well enough on a rack server, but since it uses ZFS I don’t know it would be good for home use. What alternatives are there?
Are there any truly FOSS networking options? I figure especially on the switching side you need purpose-built hardware, right? There aren’t generic motherboards with 48 network ports you can buy.
I like my Unifi setup, I’m just scared of a rug pull.
What annoys me most is people mindlessly promoting Unifi. Sure it has its advantages but no one wants to talk about disadvantages
Anecdotal: I like like my OG UDM. Bought it the year it came out. No issues in almost 7 years.
Unifi is one of those brands where this phrase applies: “when it works, it works really good.”
People will see those comments, buy the hardware, and some of them will have bad experiences. You will hear about those bad experiences way more often than someone who hasn’t had any issues with the same hardware in the same timeframe.
That’s how it is with pretty much every consumer-focused network equipment brand.