I’m not an IT professional, but looking to set up my home network with 3 WAPs, a firewall, one main switch, 5 sub-switches. I intend to have several VLANS for learning and fun and home security, including a camera system, TrueNAS, and run some small home automation apps.
I’ve used pfsense and this time, I’d prefer the “single pane of glass” idea. It’s more important to me that I have a good GUI to program that is somewhat intuitive so I don’t have to re-learn things.
I’ve worked my way through using Foritnet equipment. Unfortunately, there’s an ongoing annual cost just to keep firmware updated.
Can someone offer feedback on the simplicity/difficulty of the Unifi system vs a Fortigate system? I’m trying to decide if moving to unifi makes more sense for my particular use case.
IMO there is always a learning curve with any solution anyone tries to implement. I’ve used fortigate professionally, but I don’t care for their outstanding security vulnerabilities they refuse to fix. For the full “single pane of glass” approach you are better off with a unifi firewall, WAP’s and security cameras. As they will all tie back to the same console.
With that said, I am saying all this without knowing your budget for this. To answer your question about unifi firewalls I think they have come a long way on features and user experience. If you want to see more about how the rules work on the firewall this video helped me understand how it all works.
Thanks Maximus, I’ll take a look. The initial hardware expense is something I can absorb. I’m not a fan or reoccurring costs of any kind though, as they are harder to absorb.
More than costs though is ease of use, especially months AFTER I have everything working. Once I want to go back and make a change, or monitor what I have done, I want that to be as easy and intuitive as possible.
Fortinet creates some dependencies and safeguards that make sense, particularly in a corporate environment. You have to remove several references before you can delete a VLAN, so it becomes a multi-step process.
As you said, I’ll learn and adapt to whatever the UI is. However, once I have my network established as a home user and then need to go back in a few months later, I want to have the quickest re-learning curve possible.
