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.


At home, I have a shit ton of in-wall HD’s behind TVs, a Dream Machine SE Pro. A 16 port and an 8 port POE switch.
At work, I have a Pro Max, a 24 port enterprise switch, and a handful of access points. I also have one of their door controllers with its attached video doorbell.
Their cameras aren’t bad, but they’re overpriced. I went full reolink and haven’t regretted any of that. I use their protect nvr stuff at work, and while it works, it’s not great. If you just want something easy to set up and go, it’s good enough. If you want to do some really complicated, complex things, you’re better off with frigate or blue iris.
Their VPNs a little bit light duty. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but when I did my setups there was no local DNS option. But that’s easy enough to take care of.