People seem to love it. But it’s highly proprietary and there seems to be planned obsolescence built into their model

I’ve run OPNsense, PFsense, OpenWRT, and high end consumer routers and I’ve found Unifi the most stable. I’m also less able to screw it up and I’ve had to divert functions to VMs because I couldn’t do it on my UDM. But having Internet service fail over with notifications that the normies in the house can understand is helpful. Then being able to find the WI-FI password for the Iot network from the app is helpful. VLANS by port through a pretty simple WebUI is helpful. Their handing of power (do they support NUT yet?) and redundant links is less good. I get errors when I have two routes between switches like I broke something. I’ve brought the network down due to STP not stopping loops but I also don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’d do it again though.

For NAS, ceph storage plus NextCloud plus WebDAV has been good lately but I’m sure I’m leaving performance on the table. It’s just hard to break.

Wifi: Neat
Anything else: Havent tried.

Abstracting so much away from the admin by automagically comnfguring everything is neat but also dangerous as you’ll never know what it has configured for you.

I’m in the process of updating m homelab. Threw out the qnap nas, replaced it with a homebuild nas on Truenas (4x8TB HDD, 4x1TB SSD). Replacing my ubiquity edgerouter pro 8p with a Mikrotik hEX refresh. About a 10x speedup for throughput, 20x smaller, 1/4 power consumption. Next I’ll be looking to replace my edgeswitches. I can run them stand alone, so there’s no rush.

I am not going to buy myself deeper into ubiquity. I’ll just try to optimize for the current needs.

If you want true foss, run pfsense or opsense on your own hardware.

Not a fan. Absolutely not.

They had multiple security incidents which they kept under the rugs for a long time, they have the tendency to EOL devices without warning (which then means you need to replace your sometimes 9month old device or your whole enviroment can’t be updated), their lock-in into their ecosystem is much more complete as they can’t be used properly without their enviroment.(e.g. Omada devices can work without the Omada stuff, with Unifi you will always need a controller for some functions).

So if you realy need SDN features like Unifi look at Omada,otherwise Mikrotik is a solid alternative. (And OPNsense for firewall)

I like them. Got the whole house set up with it. Yeah, big corp IT gear will have security risks. I used PoE setups to not need to run electrical to the WAPs, used an AirMax directional antenna to get wifi at an outbuilding without needing to run cable or a powerful outdoor WAP for mesh or whatever broadcasting my wifi all over the neighborhood. Works great, stable, a bit fiddly to set up but once it’s set up it’s golden. I recommend buying used off ebay for all gear except the cloud key controller.

My biggest gripe with them is consistency. They release products without all the features they promise. They have been known to just abandon entire lines (I’m still salty about their mFi gear).

I like my UDM pro however the SE came out and for almost a year they basically ignored the Pro.

Good hardware that’s usually made or broken by their software.

OpenWRT?

It isn’t really a vendor but it is Foss. It isn’t as robust as vendor solutions but the advantage is that it will run anywhere.

For large networks with over 20 devices, I find them acceptable not because they are good but because other options are more expensive.

For small networks? I despise them

1. The UI keeps changing and moving around settings for no good reason after each update
2. You can’t setup devices directly if you have a device or two, you are required to setup a control center
3. The control center is already slow and sluggish, but the real nightmare starts when you start having 100 or more devices
4. Last couple of years they have been releasing batches with serious issues, software and hardware. The way they accepted recall for unfixable devices was so limited that many people are left with broken APs that will kill their network occasionally and the poor consumer has no idea why.
5. Honestly fuck 'em. there’s more but I don’t wanna give them any more rent space in my head on a Sunday lol

Try stay away from their cheap consumer side stuff, they underspec the hardware and fill it with (useful) bloat that the hardware can barely run.

Are there any truly FOSS networking options?

PFSense falls into this category for routers. Netgate makes hardware specifically for it, but you don’t have to buy anything from them to use PFSense. I only mention them because their hardware is good and you can buy anything from a normal home router to enterprise level gear.

I had to sign in with my ubiquiti account first before I could make a local account

I used to be pretty into ubiquiti, but this requirement really put me off. I have no desire to do anything ‘cloud’ with my router. This requirement sent me elsewhere and I sold off all my ubiquiti equipment.

TruNAS … What alternatives are there?

TruNAS has a community edition, so you could start there. Other alternatives are a standard Debian install, use mdadm to setup RAID, then setup a network share in the OS, etc.

Opinion wise: love unifi for networking equipment. Especially since that equipment doesn’t require the web account. For a Nas, I’m in too deep already, I’ll only use equipment I fully control. I wouldn’t buy a Unifi NAS just like I wouldn’t buy a Synology, but I’ll keep leaning on my Unifi stuff as long as it keeps doing its job well.

As for using TrueNAS w/ZFS at home, go for it if you know and like it! I actually was recently given my boss’s old home NAS that used to run his Plex server. When I got it it was still on FreeNAS (same thing, just a few versions behind) and it’s using ZFS. Worked for him, and now works for me, no problem. Both of us also use Unifi equipment for our networks. The only problems we’ve ever had were our own doings.

OpenWRT is basically Linux for routers and can be installed on a variety of devices - https://openwrt.org/

There is also https://www.gargoyle-router.com/

I am quite satisfied with the unifi ecosystem so far as networking and CCTV systems go. They are cloud enabled without being cloud dependent. Since the early 2025 networking update, their routers are pretty good now. The UDM SE is a pretty compelling router/POEswitch/NVR in the home context.

Their NAS ecosystem is still very new and I would not it a viable option yet. They are also leaning towards the vendor lock-in direction with drives. Its the same reason I would stay away from Synology and QNAP.

Personally, I run a old desktop as a NAS/homelab running Proxmox(FOSS based hypervisor). I run ZFS on it and its “fine”. It performs fine even with a mixed bunch of disks, provided you have them in pairs or groups of 3 that perform close to identically. I just run a Debian container on the Proxmox as my fileserver and a few VMs for homelabbing.

One player that works well in a home environment is UnRAID. It a Linux distor that runs on commodity hardware and handles redundancy with “just a bunch of disks” better than most. The UI is friendly to non technical users. The catch is that UI is commercial software. Many consider it a fair exchange for the convenience it brings.

We use it exclusively at work, it’s great for almost anything