2 ms·

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I've also soured on UniFi a lot over the last few years. It's crazy. The SMB / MSP market is massively underserved and i

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I've also soured on UniFi a lot over the last few years. It's crazy. The SMB / MSP market is massively underserved and instead of staying focused and capturing it Unifi is trying to compete in the enterprise market where, IMHO, they aren't going to succeed. If we try out Omada and feel like it gives us everything Unifi does without all the feature creep then we'll do the same thing as you; EoL sites will move from Unifi to Omada. I'll always take fewer features and stability over continuous new features. > I would suggest if you plan to stay on the managing-your-own-networks route to very strongly consider having the router/gateway stuff be separate and fully open source as I ended up. We've used pfSense forever and have been happy with it. However, 2.6.0 has some gateway/dpinger issues where the bug fixes are slotted for 2.7.0 on the CE side, so it feels like the inevitable neglect of the CE version might be starting to kick in there. I tried to explain to them the realities of the market we're in (small businesses) along with real numbers in terms of what kind of money they could extract from businesses like ours and all it got me was an offer to talk to someone in sales and we're not buying into subscriptions (ever). It would cost us $15k+ / year to switch to pfSense+. The software only subscription is nearly 2x the cost of buying their entry level appliance (assuming a 5 year lifecycle). IMHO, that's an indicator they don't want to support 3rd party hardware and there's a risk they'll eventually drop it. I wish VyOS had less crazy pricing because their stuff looks nice. They used to have a $600 / year professional subscription which they don't appear to offer anymore. I think the corporate subscription used to be <$4k / year and now it's $6k. I wonder why no one wants to commit to subscriptions. How can I sell anything to a customer when I can't give a predictable price for ongoing maintenance a year into the future? Our customers will literally go back to using their ISP supplied modems instead of proper firewalls before they'll pay the prices everyone is asking for. I don't blame them either. They only need a fraction of the functionality being sold and all of the fancy, expensive features everyone is using to justify sky high pricing are simply bad value in that context because they'll basically unneeded bloat.

xoa 4y ago
>Thanks for taking the time to reply. No problem, glad to chat about this and commiserate a bit with someone in a similar boat. >I've also soured on UniFi a lot over the last few years. It's crazy. The SMB / MSP market is massively underserved and instead of staying focused and capturing it Unifi is trying to compete in the enterprise market where, IMHO, they aren't going to succeed. Yeah, it's such a huge waste. But the CEO is a classic trouble case with near total control (owns majority of the stock and thus effectively owns the board, a few caveats in terms of protection for minority shareholders in public companies don't really stop the trend). >If we try out Omada and feel like it gives us everything Unifi does without all the feature creep then we'll do the same thing as you; EoL sites will move from Unifi to Omada. I'll always take fewer features and stability over continuous new features. UniFi hasn't even had "continuous new features" though! Or rather, their "features" have been stuff like reskinning the GUI or doing their own entire custom silly speedtest stack for a while, not "features" like PPSK, or for that matter just having normal DHCP and DNS management! Or any sort of certificate management or customization, or, like, anything of substance. Or on hardware, they didn't even bother to upgrade their UniFi Security Gateways literally ever, not once! The ones still selling now are the exact same hardware as 2014 launch, no new updates in forever. They intro new stuff without ever sunsetting older stuff in general really. Use "EA" as a popularity poll test. The dysfunction goes on and on. I don't know if Omada will be the answer yet but worth a spin IMO. I'd definitely hate having to either go back to lots of individual management or something cloud-based. I am stick with UI for PtP/PtMP stuff for the time being though, even if some rot is creeping in there too. >We've used pfSense forever and have been happy with it. However, 2.6.0 has some gateway/dpinger issues where the bug fixes are slotted for 2.7.0 on the CE side, so it feels like the inevitable neglect of the CE version might be starting to kick in there. I'm afraid that company has a history of scummy behavior too :(. I think OPNsense is just plain better but ymmv. FWIW, while it's OSS there is at least one company (Deciso) that does a "Business Edition" at a relatively sane rate (~$150/yr, less for a 3 year) with no hardware reqs (they sell hardware too but I don't suggest getting it) and does business support contracts as well. And Sunny Valley Networks does an interesting little layer 7 inspector that can plugin to it. It conversely might not be good enough for your needs either, but it's not crazy. And the free version is still quite solid. As I said in another comment the docs are pretty decent so might be worth giving them a glance and firing up a system in a VM. At any rate my clients are happy now. And despite rough edges I'm grateful there are a number of essentially decent options available.

xoa 4y ago

>Thanks for taking the time to reply. No problem, glad to chat about this and commiserate a bit with someone in a similar boat. >I've also soured on UniFi a lot over the last few years. It's crazy. The SMB / MSP market is massively underserved and instead of staying focused and capturing it Unifi is trying to compete in the enterprise market where, IMHO, they aren't going to succeed. Yeah, it's such a huge waste. But the CEO is a classic trouble case with near total control (owns majority of the stock and thus effectively owns the board, a few caveats in terms of protection for minority shareholders in public companies don't really stop the trend). >If we try out Omada and feel like it gives us everything Unifi does without all the feature creep then we'll do the same thing as you; EoL sites will move from Unifi to Omada. I'll always take fewer features and stability over continuous new features. UniFi hasn't even had "continuous new features" though! Or rather, their "features" have been stuff like reskinning the GUI or doing their own entire custom silly speedtest stack for a while, not "features" like PPSK, or for that matter just having normal DHCP and DNS management! Or any sort of certificate management or customization, or, like, anything of substance. Or on hardware, they didn't even bother to upgrade their UniFi Security Gateways literally ever, not once! The ones still selling now are the exact same hardware as 2014 launch, no new updates in forever. They intro new stuff without ever sunsetting older stuff in general really. Use "EA" as a popularity poll test. The dysfunction goes on and on. I don't know if Omada will be the answer yet but worth a spin IMO. I'd definitely hate having to either go back to lots of individual management or something cloud-based. I am stick with UI for PtP/PtMP stuff for the time being though, even if some rot is creeping in there too. >We've used pfSense forever and have been happy with it. However, 2.6.0 has some gateway/dpinger issues where the bug fixes are slotted for 2.7.0 on the CE side, so it feels like the inevitable neglect of the CE version might be starting to kick in there. I'm afraid that company has a history of scummy behavior too :(. I think OPNsense is just plain better but ymmv. FWIW, while it's OSS there is at least one company (Deciso) that does a "Business Edition" at a relatively sane rate (~$150/yr, less for a 3 year) with no hardware reqs (they sell hardware too but I don't suggest getting it) and does business support contracts as well. And Sunny Valley Networks does an interesting little layer 7 inspector that can plugin to it. It conversely might not be good enough for your needs either, but it's not crazy. And the free version is still quite solid. As I said in another comment the docs are pretty decent so might be worth giving them a glance and firing up a system in a VM. At any rate my clients are happy now. And despite rough edges I'm grateful there are a number of essentially decent options available.