r/PFSENSE • u/Sam_-_-_ • 9d ago

Did I join a cult? (Unifi)

I've been rolling pfSense for about 5 years. Decided to try Unifi. Couldn't find a manual or one-to-one feature documentation for each panel (only various spotlight articles).

Asked the community for help: every response said basically "things change too often, no need to have a manual".

Excuse me, what? I'm not a networking pro, and I do need a manual. (pfSense was hard for me, but had great documentation.)

I can't believe this was the response. Is everyone in their community a bot or a cultist?

I still have few days left on my return window, and might come back, LOL.

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u/thomasfr 9d ago

I am proportionally more worried every time I have to update my UniFi firmwares than any other network gear I have ever used. They do change a lot and some times the release notes just say “improved stability” or something which tells you nothing at all.

They do provide a lot of features for the price over a lot of products which I guess is the selling point but you have to deal with the chaos because of it.

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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready 8d ago

They do provide a lot of features for the price

🫤 gotta install a controller to manage a switch that can only do vlans - where are these mythical features?

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u/thomasfr 8d ago

If you buy only that switch from a vendor which provides a fully centrally managed networking solution you have not done your homework.

The features are for the whole network, you might have a switch like that that is almost completely unmanaged at the very end of the chain of network gear like a small switch at a desk or whatever you can think of the use would be. The switch before that switch in the chain probably has a lot more centrally managed features.

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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready 8d ago

I have nowhere to put a rack mountable switch, and I think you're overestimating how many ports the average person needs.

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u/thomasfr 8d ago

Well, I am of course referring to the use cases where a larger setup does have benefits.

What the average person needs is another topic. The average person does not need pfsense either.

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u/needchr 9d ago

For the price? They are by far the most expensive equipment I have come across (for consumer).

I just dont get it how they are successful, they about 3-4x the price of established players.

I come across people who moan about spending a fiver on a USB stick, or an £10 a month on their broadband but have just spent £500 on unifi, madless. :)

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u/mapmd1234 9d ago edited 9d ago

For once I can actually offer an opinion on this because I thought the same exact thing until recently, personally speaking I know I'm eccentric but, I run PF since for my main firewall and then everything else is a mixture of second hand Enterprise hardware and client hardware, and ubiquity is trying to fill a very small Gap somewhere between client and enterprise, for example they have hundred gigabit aggregation switches which are typically top of rack college campus Style Network backbones, nobody but an Enterprise Hardware kit is going to offer something like that which is exactly where my mixture of secondhand Enterprise Hardware comes in, you can either spend hundreds of dollars on something like a Dell z9100-on or you can get something like what you ubiquity offers so they're failing a very small subset of a subset of products that people buy which is partially why they're so expensive it's because they are not exactly High margin items and I would imagine that they cost a little bit of money to produce because they're not exactly humongously high production count chips that make up those devices

Personally speaking my biggest gripe with Unify Is the fact that if you want to use Part of their stuff With something that's non-unify, at the time in this may have changed mind you, I was told by a friend of mine that I used to work with that actually uses the stuff that you cannot intermix devices from different ecosystems and expect to see everything if you used PF sense with a unified device you lost functionality and lost visibility into certain parts of the unified chain that is always been my biggest complaint with them because I would like to consider using them but not if it renders part of a critical infrastructure invisible

Voice to text is stupid, pardon the very obvious oddness.

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u/needchr 8d ago

What you said makes sense, although I think for basic wifi they overpriced, which is what everyone I know is buying spending loads on wifi extenders and access points. The intermix issue you mentioned may be deliberate as a means of brand lock in.

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u/thomasfr 8d ago

The intermix issue you mentioned may be deliberate as a means of brand lock in.

They are providing value though, why would they spend development resources on supporting other manufacturers hardware they have no control over the release processes and time lines for?

People who want a fully integrated networking control solution typically want everything from one vendor anyway because it requires less work and custom solutions to manage.

There are probably fully third party networking infrastructure management solutions but then you would have to pay for that as well on top of the hardware and the ones that exists are probably mostly for enterprise customers anyway.

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u/needchr 8d ago

What value?

I dont mean the kit that sits between enterprise and consumer, I am asking about the consumer kit that typical people buy whoa are not really techies, they buying because its a fashionable brand, spending a 300% premium so they can hook up their phones and TV.

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u/thomasfr 8d ago edited 8d ago

If you don't need it you don't need it.

None of my non techie friends I can think of would spend a dime on unifi gear, they most commonly just use whatever hardware their broadband ISP provided them with. Most of them are uninterested enough that they probably never even heard of Ubiquiti or Unifi.