this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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What's your opinion on Ubiquiti/Unifi gear? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by early_riser@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

This is an opinion on the WiFi access points.

I took the unifi pill in 2018 on the advice of my devops coworkers that ubiquiti is set-and-forget. I also was sold on the unifi network controller I deployed and used until last month being easy to use and local only.

The single pane of glass to control and update the access points is nice. Wifi works OK. There are, however, several downsides:

  • channel and power management are not automatic and tweaking WiFi settings with unifi is not intuitive.
  • similar to your nas experience unifi advanced metrics are locked behind paying for other unifi equipment or an official controller.
  • network appliance is built on mongodb and its performance is pretty abysmal (Up to 2.5GB memory to run it)
  • ~~the network appliance is now discontinued and self-hosting the network appliance can no longer happen software-only, you have to use their "server os", which can't be run in a container.~~ edit: its been pointed out to me that running the network controller in a container is possible.

After the unifi Debian repo stopped updating properly, I decided to install openwrt on my APs.

Not only did it work well, but performance is now much better with openwrt.

I'm personally stepping away from brands that have their own ecosystems from now on, if I can help it. The enshitification is just too tempting for them, it seems, and it it's always at our expense.

[–] suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

the network appliance is now discontinued and self-hosting the network appliance can no longer happen software-only, you have to use their “server os”, which can’t be run in a container.

Of course it can, they just don't provide a pre-containerized version but other people do. The server software just a regular program that you can install on any Linux OS. I use the linuxserver Docker version, it's regularly updated and works without issue. It uses about 1.2 GB of RAM, so a little heavy, but nothing crazy.

https://community.ui.com/releases/UniFi-Network-Application-10-0-162/2efd581a-3a55-4c36-80bf-1267dbfc2aee

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-unifi-network-application/

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Ah, good catch, thanks.

It's moot point for me because I'm sick of unifi so I'm not going back to worse performance and locked-away features.