Comment by lwkl
10 hours ago
Because Unifi is more focused on the needs of businesses and enthusiasts. AVM and Netgear Orbi are products for the consumer market. So they miss a the advanced features Unifi supports.
Unifi is used by the tech-savvy homeowner that needs PoE for their security cameras and wants to control and configure their network without needing a network engineer.
And also Unifi lets you just buy stuff instead of "contact a sales rep". If I go to Netgear and filter primary port speed to 2.5g, which is hardly an enterprise spec, all 3 options are "contact a rep" which... no thanks. Who on earth wants to contact a sales rep for a 10 port 2.5gb switch?
There is now also TP-Link's Omada line at least which seems like the most comparable alternative.
I tried out Netgear Orbi and I don't know who it's actually for. It tried deploying it at my dad's place, but had to return it because it just doesn't work. Dropped in Ubiquiti gear to replace it and I had the entire network up and running within 15 minutes of applying power. And it's had zero of the issues that I had with Netgear's system.
Just wanted to drop another data point that Linksys is also trash now. So for consumer-targeted gear it seems the options are:
1. Eero - great performance, no web config (only mobile app), cloud dependent, half the features paywalled for monthly subscription (eyeroll)
2. Linksys - confirmed piles of crap, a 6E mesh kit I tried last year performed worse than my 2018 Eeros so why bother. Config is even more limiting than Eero, the web UI is a slow disaster that times out constantly, and the app is terrible and the features are badly designed.
3. Netgear - sucks as parent comment explains
4. TP-Link - reputation is that it's bad but I haven't tried
5. Asus - never tried
6. Google - no doubt they'll kill and brick these at some point
Any others I'm forgetting?