It sounds to me like you have above-average demands on your network and I’d agree that UniFi (and therefore probably Omada) are not what I’d consider great as routers/firewalls.
I’m a fan of pfSense/OPNSense for that purpose, which you can install on pretty much any x86_64 hardware. They’re both wonderful and you can fine tune to your heart’s content or get them set the way you like and leave them.
If you really like a dedicated router appliance, I do like the Mikrotiks, too, but you’d have to study their sometimes-peculiar way of doing things.
To my tastes, UniFi does great at switching and wireless, but any of you’re unhappy with that direction, I’ve heard good things about Omada and the Aruba stuff is fantastic. I recently have been playing with some used iap-325s from eBay. I picked them up for $25 and they’ve been terrific.
I agree. The Unifi firewall leaves a lot to be desired, but their switches and access points are great!
I’m currently running pfSense on one of these, and I have that connected to Unifi PoE switch with two Unifi APs connected to it, as well as several PoE IP cameras. It runs great, and I have no complaints.
If I were redoing it today, I would grab a more modern version of my firewall hardware, preferably with 2.5g nics, but pretty much everything else is great!
Your setup is actually very similar to mine at home, except that I’m running pfSense on a used thin client with a quad-port NIC. I agree the UniFi switches and APs have never given me a problem.
Very similar to my setup as well. I have a Qotom with 5x2.5Gb NICs. It’s got a lower end processor - Intel Celeron J4125 but I haven’t noticed any performance issues with my 1.5Gb connection.
I’ve got my proxmox cluster and my workstation on one interface with a 2.5Gb unmanaged switch, and then on another interface a Unifi 8 Lite PoE switch with 2 Unifi AP’s where all the streaming devices, wife’s and kids devices live.
I almost went with the opnsense route as well, the versatility of this device and the fact it can run on lots of hardware configs makes it hard to find a hw/feature combination that will serve my needs with low power usage and no fan. Also I hope that mikrotiks fw updates have a lower chance of breaking my setup as I’ve read some bad experiences with pfsense/opnsense updates in the past.
None the less I do like the opnsense setup and might add an additional opnsense vm in the future to play around with!