Unifi is what you swap over to once your time becomes more scarce and money more plentiful. At least in all the cases of my peer group.
It's far less customizable, and can be maddening sometimes if it doesn't Just Work(tm) - debugging it can be a giant pain. You will also be paying the Ubiquiti tax.
I simply redesigned my overly complex home network to be much more boring, and am okay with that. I don't want to tinker with my home IT stuff much these days - I want it to just work, and changes to be easy.
I've found Unifi Network and Unifi Protect to have come a long way in the past 3-4 years. They still drop hardware duds and software bugs here and there, but overall it's been a rather decent experience for the most part. I understand all the core level technology and configuration bits, but I simply do not have the desire to ssh into switches or whatever to configure a new port these days. Then open source NVR story is also just horrible even today.
It's also great for remote installs for other non-technical people/orgs I help out with. One dashboard I can just click on and go take a look to figure out whatever problem they may be having. And a new setup takes hours vs. days.
That your network stack and your nvr stack was the same thing (and fully local) was a huge selling point for me. If you are only interested in network, you could probably get more customizable/hackable or cheaper (or both) alternatives.
I do not know of an alternative stack that does everything like Unifi.
I've found the same. I've moved from a homebrew tinkerer's delight home network with pfSense running in a VM, Supermicro FreeBSD ZFS fileserver, hodgepodge of cameras etc. to a top-to-bottom Unifi Stack.
My time is worth a lot more now, my family appreciates very much that it "Just Works" (tm), and -- most importantly -- the cognitive load for me is a fraction of before.
I’m sort of all for not wanting to spend much time fiddling with my home network, but the issue for me that UniFi doesn’t actually Just Work. It’s too buggy.
I choose to believe you but your experience and mine are apparently VASTLY different. I would even say I'm on the complicated side of pro-sumer in terms of my network. That is to say it's surprising and I think you might just be unlucky.
It's far less customizable, and can be maddening sometimes if it doesn't Just Work(tm) - debugging it can be a giant pain. You will also be paying the Ubiquiti tax.
I simply redesigned my overly complex home network to be much more boring, and am okay with that. I don't want to tinker with my home IT stuff much these days - I want it to just work, and changes to be easy.
I've found Unifi Network and Unifi Protect to have come a long way in the past 3-4 years. They still drop hardware duds and software bugs here and there, but overall it's been a rather decent experience for the most part. I understand all the core level technology and configuration bits, but I simply do not have the desire to ssh into switches or whatever to configure a new port these days. Then open source NVR story is also just horrible even today.
It's also great for remote installs for other non-technical people/orgs I help out with. One dashboard I can just click on and go take a look to figure out whatever problem they may be having. And a new setup takes hours vs. days.