I finally went full Unifi - now coming back

I know a bunch of homelabbers are thinking Mikrotik vs Ubiquiti. The age old question.

My old setup was RB5009upr + CRS312 + CRS309

New setup UCG-max + 2x US-XG-6POE + USW-AGGR

Both were using 2x U7-PRO unifi APs

One of the reasons I switched was just to try it, and also because I was temporarily obsessed with DPI and having nice visuals and EVERYTHING under one controller.

UBIQUITI

I have to reiterate what others will say in that if you have a single setup Unifi is awesome. very little uncertainty for just getting things going and connected.

  • flexibility though for L3 and other features is horrible. they have a super weird trunking (which you can't change) that sucks. A lot of their devices are only L2+, and often don't have features such as DHCP that you need.

MIKROTIK

Much harder to setup and learn but really for basics you can learn the interfaces menu, the bridge menu, interface grouping like lan/wan,, the firewalling, and routes - and you're like 90% there. After that it's rock solid.

  • the horrid thing is as an OCD labber you will feel "incomplete" because you have pretty much no option for WIFI (you know what I mean you ain't going back to a mid-power 6). IF mikrotik just released an AVG wifi7 - not even best in class.. I'm SURE the other uptick in users would pay for it.
  • DPI and visuals you gotta do something like mirror a port or do Flow streams... more "work" but I'm saying if I had to do it again. I would put in a little more to my grafana deployment and do all this...

BOTTOM LINE.

Unifi will "work" but if you're coming off Mikrotik it will be completely underwhelming and you will be trading feats - possibly ending up that your "upgrade" turns out to be a wash... such that you may feel you wasted your time like me. As it's so close I'll stay with Ubiquiti for a bit so as not to explain why eBay has so much record of me selling there. But keeping my eyes peeled to move back to Mikrotik on next over haul.

If you are just getting something up in a very hands off way like moonlighting as an SMB network admin. then go unifi bill the client, have the satisfaction and let them be wowed by the result. If it's for YOUR lab and you want bang for the buck. Stay on the 'tik! It's like half the cost. And I LOVE how almost every device is full ROS so you have the option of getting the best out of even weaker devices. Different models mostly have different load capacities but there isn't this stream of L2+ or proprietary implementations like other vendors do.

Just my 2cents.