I ended up going with TP-Link Omada and have been happy so far (a managed switch and wifi 6 WAPs). I am a bit concerned about their security track record given how bad their soho products are, so I ended up sticking with my opnsense router at the perimeter as the first line of defense.
I’m curious to hear what you think you’re missing out on with Omada.
Ubiquiti has had plenty of bad security issues as well I'm afraid, but fundamentally one of the advantages of both is that with a self-hostable controller and VLAN isolation you should be able to minimize your attack area pretty well from both the LAN and WAN. No remote dependencies at all. But like you I run OPNsense at the edge, you do at least have to trust their firewall and such if you want to go full single-pane.
Well, [0] mentions that they left the ER firmware alone for two years. They also don't sell the ER hardware anymore.
Looking at the changelog in combination with the comments on the news item about the new release, it looks like there are many bugs left unfixed. If this analysis is correct [2], nearly nothing was changed.
That smells an awful lot like abandonment.
> ...VLAN issue unacknowledged and unfixed... were both wrong.
This subthread [3] disagrees with you. As someone who has suffered through multi-quarter "struggle sessions" [4] with UBNT engineering staff about broken basic functionality, I can totally believe a report that UBNT claims something has been fixed when it's very much not fixed.
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794857>
[1] <https://community.ui.com/releases/EdgeRouter-3-0-0/33ee3852-...>
[2] <https://community.ui.com/releases/EdgeRouter-3-0-0/33ee3852-...>
[3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44756915>
[4] Complete with round after round of them saying "Hey, we fixed it! Try the latest beta!", and me replying "No, you didn't. Did you run my 100% reliable reproducer that I've given you? It sure looks like you haven't because that reproducer still reproduces the problem.".
TP-Link stepped in and have been working hard on Omada being a direct competitor. It's clearly inspired liberally from UniFi but that's A-OK by me, it's healthy for both to be going head to head. In my experience it had somewhat fewer features, particularly initially, and they definitely don't cover the full breadth of cool and useful niches that Ubiquiti does either. But what there is has worked well and been more reliable for me, particularly in a mixed environment. For example Omada worked perfected day 1 with automatic L3 controller discovery using a simple DHCP Option 138 set on my OPNsense unit pointing right at my controller FQDN. It was easy and built-in to supply a proper certificate for the Web GUI. I never got either of those to work with the UniFi controller. The switching has been rock solid reliable and the WiFi more performant, better coverage, and features like PPSK were added way before Ubiquiti did and have a much better interface.
However, Ubiquiti does seem to perhaps be turning things around a bit. Their router hardware is no longer garbage, even if it is of course far less then you can do yourself. From what I can see in simple ongoing tests they do a better job on the software side for router features now as well, so if you're all-in on both systems for the total single-pane experience UniFi might once again be better. Their announcement of the "UniFi OS Server" 3 months ago (in Early Access) and publicly last month was both a surprise and heartening. Rarely does one see companies that start down the path of lock-in reverse course at all. If they make it possible to run all their various controller applications on your own hardware I'd definitely start to add more back into my mix.
So if you've got decently modern Omada hardware (and you probably do because not like it's been around that long, in terms of networks anyway) I'd be in no massive rush to switch to UniFi unless you see some key specific things you'd like. If you think you ever might want to roll your own other infra same thing even harder. But if you're thinking about a bunch of upgrades anyway then worth keeping an eye on and looking carefully at the various feature mixes each have.
And that's a really statement that makes me super happy to say, because I think each is now driving the other, which is really healthy for this ecosystem!
I was more just curious if I was missing out on something great (or if I ever decide to upgrade to WiFi 7+)