I want to get away from the default ISP router and have heard good things about UniFi (mostly from Troy Hunt). We have a fairly normal UK house but I splurged on fibre optic hook up as lockdown hit
My advice would be to stay away from "modern ways" relying on cloud services that depend on an external vendor. You'd be paying a premium to essentially put an expiration date on networking equipment that would otherwise last almost forever.
On a home network there is little to no need for any of these cloud management features as the configuration tends to be static and the router is "set and forget".
I suggest a router supported by OpenWRT; this one looks good but a bit expensive: https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/, otherwise you can try your luck with consumer-grade routers that support it (TP-Link?) but performance might not be ideal. Alternatively, I can also recommend the Mikrotik RB3011 as I've had good success with it.
For the wireless side of things, having multiple access points is the key. Since they're on your internal network and behind your firewall, security update availability is less of an issue. Again, either enterprise-grade Wi-Fi systems or OpenWRT-supported access points.
On a home network there is little to no need for any of these cloud management features as the configuration tends to be static and the router is "set and forget".
I suggest a router supported by OpenWRT; this one looks good but a bit expensive: https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/, otherwise you can try your luck with consumer-grade routers that support it (TP-Link?) but performance might not be ideal. Alternatively, I can also recommend the Mikrotik RB3011 as I've had good success with it.
For the wireless side of things, having multiple access points is the key. Since they're on your internal network and behind your firewall, security update availability is less of an issue. Again, either enterprise-grade Wi-Fi systems or OpenWRT-supported access points.