I listen to the 2.5 Admins podcast and love it. However on one of the latest podcasts Jim went on a rant about Unifi
-their switches are unreliable
-Unifi forces you to the cloud to manage things
-TP Link is better for local management and their wifi is better
Um, what ? I am in enterprise IT and have always wanted to try Unifi switching, but we only use Cisco. Is Unifi switching really unreliable? We had a unifi switch in an office and the network team swapped it out for traditional cisco and did say it glitched a few times, but i just assumed it wasn’t working well with the other cisco switches and they were cisco snobs.
As for TP Link, we used to use TP Link wifi at one office and I didn’t like it. I would have to reboot the APs to fix issues and I could never figure out why.
And Unifi does not force you to the cloud, you can manage it locally.
Does anyone have experience with unifi switching? has it been reliable for you? I seem to recall Tom put an entire company on unifi high end switches and I doubt they would have issues all the time.
I like 2.5 admins and Jim’s got a lot of solid advice but he is really provably wrong about this one. I have deployed thousands of UniFi devices and reliably moved petabytes of data through them just fine. If UniFi was as bad as he claimed they would not have the market they have.
The provably wrong part is the claim they are “Forcing the cloud” as that is just not true. You can see their https://www.ui.com/trust-center page and when you go through the setup of a new UniFi gateway it has an option to connect to their cloud but you can EASILY skip that ask and setup a local only account.
Yeah I wish we had unifi switches in some of our offices. It seems like it’s easier to troubleshoot what is attached to what than with a traditional switch. Hunt for mac address via cli and all that.
I’m not as prolific as Tom in this matter, but I’ve deployed over 5 dozen UniFi switches over the past 10 years and I might have had 1 fail in that entire time. The claim that their switches are unreliable is strange to me. I’ve dealt with many Netgear, Linksys, TP Link, (granted old) 3Com, etc. switches randomly die in that time, but only maybe 1 or two UniFi switches die in the past 10 years that I can think of. All UniFi switches are controlled on my self-hosted controller, zero in the cloud interface.
If I fully managed them and stopped them ever talking out, I might consider second hand units if money was really tight…… and who knows one day they might unlock the boot loader, or someone hack it because of their security attitude…. leaving you with decently powerful hardware ready for the openwrt community
Same with those dodgy routers on Amazon, what a bargain buying them used for peanuts if you could put your own firmware on them
I must have deployed over 150 Unifi switches since 2020. I only had one switch die and that was in the first week while setting up in the lab. Before 2020 I was working with Cisco switches and they were just a solid a Unifi switches. With over 80 blade versions deployed in a major campus I would say one blade would fail every year.
I did a write up and video on this topic as it does keep coming up. The mention on 2.5 Admins is just the latest time that I have heard this brought up.
