Comment by johncolanduoni
11 hours ago
Is OpenWRT on Unifi APs any good? I hadn’t heard of it before, and I couldn’t find any performance comparisons on a quick search. Ubiquiti has gone downhill on a lot of things the last 5 years or so, but their radio firmware has always been a step up (within their price range) for me. I wouldn’t mind ditching the Unifi controller software though.
I'm using an U6+ with OpenWRT on it, flashed straight after unboxing and it's the only thing serving wireless in my household
It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.
Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.
I’m surprised there aren’t any better options than flashing over a U6+
I don't recall their latest hardware is supported, but why would you want that anyway if you're not looking to go all in on their controller stack?
The controller is annoying and changes completely every 6 months, and for home I use basically none of its features beyond configuring the AP. Virtualy all the issues I’ve had with Unifi APs were controller bugs, telling the AP firmware to do stupid things when it could have done literally nothing.
That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.
If you dislike their UI, not going to try to convince you, but it is part of the value of the system.
Have you looked at Mikrotik? They offer a more traditional autonomous OS w/o controllers and both a nice CLI and a powerful GUI tool.