Related: what's the current best option for those of us who like old UniFi's ease of use, but don't like new Unifi's "use our cloud, or else..." attitude and the constant firmware issues?
1. had the UDM for about a year, then at some point found out that some firmware update had completely trashed 2.4GHz wifi. Like you can connect to it but if you transfer more than 1MB or so it just hangs, reconnect works but basically unusable, 5GHz works fine but in my house the office just did not get good enough coverage. Like, dude, you had ONE JOB!
2. Bought a Ruckus AP and an Mikrotik hEX S to do routing. Wifi is better but office still did not have good enough coverage.
3. Finally gave up and just ran some CAT 6A from the router to my office. Night and day.
From my research Ruckus gear is really good and requires no controller nor cloud connectivity whatsoever but expensive. Mikrotik is nice for wired stuff, but mostly quite dated for wireless, also they still carry a lot of their previous generation gear .. a lot of it has really wimpy CPU's, so do some research. Also the configuration can be a bit involved, tho lot of internet advice on a decent setup.
After the security incident a few years ago, Ubiquiti pushed an update that let's you login to it via a local credential rather than their cloud identity server.
I don't see anything in UDM Pro's Unifi that is dependent on their cloud (other than checking for updates)
It is more complex, you have to get used to Winbox, but after that, there's no way back to Unifi. There are no dashboards that look nice in screenshots, but on the other hand, the stats provided make sense.
But wrt firmware issues, Mikrotik also has occasional one.
Surprisingly Cisco, with their small business line, has one of the better looking contenders. No subscription - and I didn't need anything (not even an email) to download firmware updates or the controller (!!) Not your fathers Cisco! Their controller lags Unifi, but not by much. I scored a router and switch off of ebay just to dabble and it was pretty promising. I haven't looked at it for a while; I probably need to fire it back up and see if it's matured any. In the end for firewall I went back to OpnSense. Unifi switches are OK but their one year hardware warranty, frankly, sucks. If I were to by new switches I'd probably just go back to netgear. Their lifetime warranty is pretty hard to beat. I've had them replace 10 year old switches with nary a blink of the eye so it's not just lip service.
https://community.ui.com/questions/BUG-USG-PPPoE-or-Static-I...
The original cloud key is quite slow but totally usable; there's a docker container and running on anything faster than a Pi its quite fast and snappy.
They don't have this attitude and never have. You can use local accounts, have always been able to use local accounts.
The only thing out there that's better than Ubiquiti is actual enterprise gear, all of which now requires subscription licensing. Unfortunately if you want a buy once / cry once solution for prosumer usage, Ubiquiti is the best option. I hunted for alternatives several times, and nobody is competitive. Microtik is the next closest option, but it's frankly garbage and with bigger security issues.
Ubiquiti is the least smelly networking solution in a room full of really smelly options. They are not consumer friendly like they used to be.
Agreed entirely. Unfortunately this is a market that's not well served because there's a lot more money to be made just shoveling consumer garbage out or putting small businesses over the barrel with subscriptions rather than offering a proper prosumer product.