No this is false. Vegans have a point. UniFi enthusiasts are damaged without any underlying technical or moral reasoning.
UBNT has this weird market slice where their kit falls into being either dogshit with long term support or almost great with terrible support.
Seeing the same people complaining that they have to move to a new portal every few years, deploying customer facing Unifi OLTs gives me this incredible belly laugh.
* networking UI that lets you document things (name ports and devices, etc)
* security cameras
* storage/playback for security video
* quick setup
* zero fiddling required
All this needs to be integrated and must not require fussing around too much, I currently have three networks/setups and my life is too short for manually messing around with infrastructure.
I guess you would classify me as a "damaged unifi enthusiast", while I'm just practical: this stuff works for me (has worked for the last several years). I'm open to other solutions, but they need to be more than just "possible" and have more advantages than "not being unifi".
I've been slowly accumulating Unifi gear and I'm happy with it, though my experience is mixed - the prices are relatively good for a unified ecosystem, IMO.
OTOH I've had two pieces of equipment die: an outdoor camera that shorted PoE pins because it really wasn't an outdoor camera, and the original doorbell that died after about three years of use (cause of death unknown, but I suspect a heavy rainstorm). Technically I had a third 48-port, 1st gen EdgeRouter Pro (750W model) that I saved from e-waste that died, but that already had quite a few years under its belt.
I still lean towards liking them. I have a set of 5 in-wall APs that have been functioning for 5? 6? years straight and still get updates and work with the unifi console. My Dream Machine Pro works pretty well for its purpose. I don't like that it doesn't offer more PoE+2.5G port options, and that only two ports are true PoE++, but from an effort perspective it's been so nice to manage.
All this being said, I think that their strength is in APs that are a good balance of tech + cost, and cameras which lean slightly more expensive but are trivially easy to manage locally and remotely. Going forward I'd probably skip unifi cameras and try to integrate OTS ONVIF cameras which will be a better value.
I'd avoid any of the large switching gear. I don't think that stuff is well-priced, and it lags a bit behind what you can find from Mikrotik and other manufacturers. It's not that important to have that stuff included in your dashboards, IMO.
It will cost a little more than the cheap ones on Amazon, but you get fully locally-hosted setup and their camera controller is running linux. You can swap in your own hard-drive for storing recordings. No subscriptions, and setup is pretty easy. Their technical support is top-notch - it's a small company and their engineers know the equipment well. No relationship, but I a customer.
There’s very little alternative if you want a networking ecosystem plus owning your data.
I think it’s sneering at people who have something doing some pieces automatically for you, when the OP cobbled it together themselves uphill both ways.
UI is a great ecosystem for home and small businesses.
UBNT has this weird market slice where their kit falls into being either dogshit with long term support or almost great with terrible support.
Seeing the same people complaining that they have to move to a new portal every few years, deploying customer facing Unifi OLTs gives me this incredible belly laugh.