I used to have a UDM Pro, a Unifi rack mount switch, four APs, three cameras, and two mini POE switches. I sold it all when I moved recently, and now I just have 3 cheapish routers running OpenWRT.
I wish I kept all the Unifi stuff.
Do it.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Dew it.
Edit:
This post is like an addict asking a group of other addicts if they should stop while the whole group takes another hit.
Go for Mikrotik.
I had to upgrade my EdgeRouterX when I got gig fiber. I kept the Ubiquiti APs, I really like their management interface. But I replaced the router with a Mikrotik RB4011iGS+ because I thought it had a better feature set than the equivalent UBNT and was half the price.
Pretty much any mikrotik is a fantastic piece of kit to have.
It is so unbelievably versatile.
I love the various mikrotik routers, switches and APs I have. I use them all the time for little ad-hoc networks and projects and stuff.
You will learn a lot about networking when using them.
But Unifi is a hell of a lot easier to use, and I have not found anything I can't do on unifi (but I don't do bgp, mlag, etc at home).
B&h photo ans video as well as adorama let you buy ubiquiti equipment and return it.
Ubiquiti has a reputation for not accepting returns on properly functional gear
I too went down this road. Everything bar the Modem is Unifi in my home network now. The central management is very convenient, but if you want to hear about grievances, I got two for you to choose from. First, IPv6 support is needlessly limited. You can have Prefix Delegation or advertise a ULA network, but not both at the same time. No idea why. This seems very easy to implement. Second, the local dynamic DNS (i.e. advertising the IPs of your local clients) works sometimes, but not all the time. You can mitigate this one by using .local as your domain ‘though, in which case you fall back on MDNS in case the Unifi DNS fails.
I just got screwed over when my UDR failed after 2.5 years and they refuse to do anything about it because it is just out of warranty. Their tech support admitted it was a hardware failure but they are refusing to replace it.
I'd be really wary about investing in their hardware. I never had something break on me so soon.
Best of luck out there.
The UDR and UDM line are so horrifically poorly designed it’s frankly astonishing they ever left the drawing board. Not only is the shape unwieldy and awkward enough on its own, the thermals on those things are terrible. I used to wake up to no internet every few weeks because my UDM would overheat and would be unable to boot until you cooled it down. I learned to just stick it in the fridge for a bit to cool it down so it could boot again.
The UniFi UCG ultra and the Max are far better machines, capable of doing just as much if not more than the Pill shaped routers while staying cool and not sounding like a jet engine every time you send a text over wifi. The only thing you even lose is the integrated Access Point which sucks compared to the discrete ones anyway.
This is exactly what is happening to me. The wifi turns off and the only way to fix it is a pull-the-plug power cycle.
Thanks for the advice but I'm pretty bitter about how it all went down. I'm gonna look elsewhere for network hardware.
As much as I dislike UniFi, it is true that there isn’t really a competitor in their tier of equipment. Upgrading would be a good choice, but if you end up choosing to stay with UniFi, I’d highly recommend the UCGs.
This will happen automatically if you buy enough and start experiencing their true hardware failure rate lol.
Get ready to see lots of this in your future:
No explanation, the connection is fine, the cloudkey is fine, the camera is fine, it just randomly decides to drop quality permanently.
Is this a common issue folks have with Protect? I haven’t seen it talked about so far.
TBH, for me, Protect has been so much better than the other NVR solutions I’ve tried it has been a big driving force behind the appeal for me.
I've seen a few posts on reddit while trying to solve it, but no idea how widespread the issue is. There certainly isnt a solution that I've found yet.
Other than this issue, I agree, protect is quite good, but there isnt much point having nice 4k cameras if they dont work correctly...
Oh, also, had 2 cloudkeys develop disk problems within weeks of owning them, so that was very annoying. 3rd one is going strong though.
How was support experience wrt replacing the bad cloudkeys?
Went through the local PC shop, so not too bad, but still frustrating.
I’ve tried a lot of self-hosted NVR solutions as well as Synology Surveillance Station and Unifi Protect.
Granted I only tried with third party cameras and never Unifi cameras, but I was not a big fan of Protect, even with latest updates. Performance was just so sluggish for live view to come up or even scrubbing the recording. Support for third party cameras is also extremely limited, only supporting ONVIF and ignoring any events camera provides.
Synology has been rock solid, but very $$$ for camera licenses.
Scrypted to get cameras into HKSV is pretty great. Frigate is awesome at “AI” detection and classification, but needs a GPU or TPU accelerator.
Most recently I decided to save myself some headaches and got Aqara G5 Pro cameras. Native HomeKit Secure Video, ability to save video to NAS just as video files for long term storage, free 24HR continuous recording to Aqara cloud, ONVIF and RTSP feeds so the cameras can integrate with Protect or any other NVR.
I will admit I gave Protect an unfair advantage as it’s the only fully first party solution I tried (unless you count Apple HomeKit Secure Video?)
Protect with 3rd party cameras is indeed lacking. But it works like magic with first party cameras.
The only other solution I’ve tried was QNAP QVR Pro with third party cameras and it was awful
Sounds like you’re having better luck with HKSV than I did. For me that is where I started and quickly bailed on it despite the unlimited cloud storage. It just did a terrible job at recording video. It would always end the recording with the detected subject still in the frame. It was incredibly frustrating.
I’m currently have a problem getting protect to work properly on android devices. Works perfect on my iPhone not so much on the old android tablet I wanted to use as a screen or a modern android phone
You can only order more kit, if you share it out. With every member of this community!
Do their radios still not do 801.11af? You still need to have their stupid POE injectors hanging on the wall?