I too did almost exactly this (albeit a few years ago) and moved to a Ubiquiti UniFi setup for my own place as well as a few small business sites I manage. The single biggest reason was that I became so sick of dealing with updates for "consumer" hardware, if there ever even were any. I didn't find open source to help much on that front either, the whole 30-30-30 song and dance or whatever it was and digging various supported versions up and dealing with the crummy UI and device-by-device work was a PITA and the hardware wasn't even generally cheaper.

It's absolutely not all roses on the UBNT side of things. They are exhibiting some of classic signs of expanding too fast and stretching themselves a bit too thin. In particular their hardware lineup is starting to get overly broad and they aren't being aggressive about retiring older products and keeping the matrix simple, which of course in turn represents an increasing maintenance burden. And some of their hardware which was disruptively priced and fantastic value at launch is now getting very old in the tooth. The UniFi controller UI can be shallow for more then simple usage of things like DNS/DHCP/RADIUS, granted a lot of HN types may have their own separate appliances/servers for that. Their USG has always been a bit of an orphan and only recently has really started getting the serious attention it needs. They've got some features on high end hardware that while niche still haven't been fleshed out. Their EdgeRouter hardware is keeping up better though.

That said the update process has continued to be pleasant and solid, and their support even for old devices has been excellent. There are no required ties to any external services. The hardware itself has been very reliable, and even the RMA process for when something burned out on us was decent (2 minute wait to online chat on a Sunday morning and immediate RMA approval). They've been quite good on security updates for a number of the major issues that have come up over the last year, and have had no major snafus (that MikroTik one storing passwords as plain text was painful/disturbing to see). While enterprises will have more advanced needs for SoHo situations even if they're not open source I think UBNT is worth consideration, particularly for those wearing plenty of hats already who are ready to cut down on cognitive load a bit.

> UBNT is worth consideration, particularly for those wearing plenty of hats already who are ready to cut down on cognitive load a bit.

I've been running UniFi APs for years, but recently switched from my pfSense appliances to USG routers. I lost a lot of flexibility (especially for things like VPN configuration), but the simplicity and seamless management have been a huge time-saver.

I am puzzled by some of their new offerings—do they really expect any serious commercial customers to install lighting powered by PoE? Perhaps they're onto something innovative, but it seems like a distraction from their core business.

>I've been running UniFi APs for years, but recently switched from my pfSense appliances to USG routers. I lost a lot of flexibility (especially for things like VPN configuration), but the simplicity and seamless management have been a huge time-saver.

Yes, although I want to emphasize again that while they made a new hire specifically for the USG and it's seen dramatic improvements in the last year [1] it was still a kind of orphan child for a while and I still need to drop down to the shell sometimes for initial setup. Rock solid after that and simple and good integration with the overall site sure but it hasn't always been clear for someone starting from scratch how to get it up the first time in common SoHo situations. Also for those with gigabit links who want to run Suricata IDS/IPS (which requires turning off hardware offload), Ubiquiti just doesn't offer anything even remotely SoHo priced with the muscle for that right now. The low end USG "3P" (~$110) maxes out around 150 Mbps with IPS after the most recent update (an improvement from 85 Mbps before that) while the Pro (~$300) maxes out around 430-450. Only the XG can handle a gigabit or higher but that's $2500 and built with 8x 10G links, it's ludicrous overkill for those who don't want its other features and routing. Granted gigabit fiber links are far from the norm but they're gradually increasing and the HN crowd may be more likely to go for them then many, and the hardware in the USG 3P and USG Pro is just old now.

>I am puzzled by some of their new offerings—do they really expect any serious commercial customers to install lighting powered by PoE? Perhaps they're onto something innovative, but it seems like a distraction from their core business.

I definitely agree about distractions, though at the same time we should recognize that of course different divisions and people can be doing different things at the same time, development and engineering talent isn't necessarily fungible there. Still, they aren't a megacorp, overall resources and management bandwidth isn't unlimited either.

On the other hand at one point Ubiquiti had a real effort in the IOT space called MFi, but due to a lot of internal technical debt issues there (IIRC there) it essentially got canned, and they planned to eventually resurrect it on top of their more advanced foundations but haven't had the bandwidth. Maybe the lighting and their efforts to improve their security offerings are some first baby steps towards getting back into that? In fairness IOT has some of the same properties in terms of suckage that have made their networking efforts successful, and could also be a major market. Updates are often a pain or non-existent, the security story is awful, and much of it insists on using 3rd party cloud dependencies. There could be a real valuable hole there for Ubiquiti to fill were they to execute well enough, though I'd feel better about it if their core felt more tightly managed and foundations a bit steadier. We'll see I guess, and at least lighting should have been a pretty low R&D way experiment with it?

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1: And for better or worse, the very fact of a piece of cheaper networking gear seeing years of support and improvements is depressingly unusual in the industry.

I've been running a RT-AC68U for a while. Rock solid stable on Asuswrt-Merlin[1] (204 days uptime last I checked, and the last reboot was due to a power cut, and easily get 50MB/s to my file server over wireless). The Asuswrt interface is a little clunky, but once it's set up it works fine. I've recently changed to Tomato (needed VLAN tagging for wireless), which seems just as solid (55-60MB/s to file server), but I haven't tested WAN/NAT performance (moved to a pfSense box).

[1] DD-WRT struggled with 100Mbps to WAN - hardware NAT

Same experience here. RT-AC68U flashed with AsusWRT Merlin works great, and I'm using a lot of things: VPN, DNS filters, DNS per mac adddress, etc.

Same case for me. I had an AC88U. I got tired of it because the 5GHz 802.11ac radio seemed like it'd be forever broken in OSS firmwares. I felt asuswrt was pretty crappy too. I went ubiquiti. Their management is nice, and they actually seem interested in fixing bugs in their firmware.

On the AC66U, 5GHz radio seemed to work well and I got consistent 105-ish Mbps in the same room as the AP.

(I'm not disputing your experience, but don't want other readers to conclude that 5GHz doesn't work on any of them.)

Is that the expected rate on an AC66U? I'm getting close to 300 Mbps real-world speeds in a very noisy environment on my Unifi lite.

Sorry. I certainly should have been clearer, especially with this crowd. That test was rate-limited by my cable modem. I was on a 100-down package at the time. I did not do a intra-house speed test.

I could be wrong or things may have changed. I think the core issue was the 88u used a different broadcom wireless chipset which has very poor Linux support.