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UniFi is great for small-to-medium networks!
December 20, 2018

UniFi is great for small-to-medium networks!

Aaron Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ubiquiti Networks UniFi

We have a UniFi-managed 48 port POE switch and a handful of the UniFi access points. Everything is very easy to get set up and working. It allowed us to very quickly build out our WiFi network with only having to run one cable to each access point. The only drawback has been the need to run the controller on a server somewhere. They do have gateway devices you can buy now that will run the controller software or you can go the cloud-hosted route; however, our services are in-house and for security, everything needs to run here.
  • Dead simple setup.
  • Easy to update.
  • Same features many of the other brands offer.
  • Firmware quality. Some of the past firmwares have had annoying bugs (such as rebooting the switch when changing a single port's LAN settings).
  • The controller software needing to be run on a server.
  • Client history could be more than 5 days. It's running on a server, why is there a limit to this data?
  • The access points and switch were extremely affordable and we've had minimal downtime over the life of the products.
  • The switch was in our main rack and there was a bug in the firmware that would reboot the switch if you made a change to one of the switch ports (that was not in use at the time). This caused our entire organization to have a network outage, in the middle of the day. Fortunately we didn't have any customer refunds to issue. We've had to purchase different switches for the main racks, and place the UniFi switch in a better suited place.
We've had all kinds of access points and switches in our organization over the years. Between Apple AirPort, NetGear, LinkSys, and Dell, the UniFi access points have been the best ones. The UniFi switches have been good except for some minor mishaps with firmware bugs. We eventually landed on Dell-managed switches for the racks of servers, but the UniFi switches have a place for connecting various office spaces to the racks. We opted not to go with the UniFi threat management gateway because pfSense offers a much more feature-rich experience for controlling proxies and firewalls that UniFi just doesn't handle well (yet).
For small-to-medium businesses, the suite of UniFi products is outstanding. Getting it set up and integrated into existing infrastructure was amazingly simple. Clients will seamlessly hand off to access points as you roam around the building and the coverage of their access points is stellar. However, if you have a larger organization that needs complicated firewalls, proxies, or network management, you could be finding yourself buying a lot of equipment to get it to work together seamlessly. If you go all-in with all of their products from the threat management gateway all the way through switches and access points, you won't be disappointed. If you already have firewalls with complicated setups, you may not want to go all-in as it looks like they are just not as feature-rich.