>Since you've operated both, whats your opinion on the Ubiquiti vs the TP-Link Omada and why did you switch?

Not sure if you'll see this but I'll give it a shot, and I haven't entirely switched yet, I've just been starting the process. You can do a quick search for "xoa unifi" here and switch to comments to see a bunch of history, but in short I was a huge fan of Ubiquiti and while never huge did end up installing a few hundred pieces of their gear across a number of sites. But due to a very bad leadership the company has become a dumpster fire of development which became impossible to ignore maybe 3-4 years ago, and since then the trajectory has continued relentlessly with the kind of sickening momentum that we've all seen so often before and is yet so hard to stop. The old forums are dead and community has degraded in turn, there's a lot of textbook bikeshedding, changing around the UI and constantly churning shiny graphs and more hardware while all sorts of bugs and basic reliability issues fester. Really basic critical features left sitting for years. There is no sort of feature or issue tracker. I don't want to repeat everything because it's been such a saga and depressing waste of potential, but the writing has been on the wall for UniFi for a good long while (their PtP/PtMP gear is still viable in many situations though serious issues have cropped up there too in some lines). On the other hand, with a sort of grim irony one of the core promises of UniFi has been proved by this very situation: by enabling full self-hosting and fairly decent isolation and decoupling of functionality, even the company behind it descending hasn't torched things and allowed a more graceful off ramp. I was able to switch all my routing/gateway functionality to OPNsense, giving another few years for the far less problematic switching/wifi. The gear could all be run with a management VLAN routed to the controller via WireGuard tunnels which meant not having to have anything exposed to the general web or even regular LAN users, significantly reducing my concerns about its insecurity. So while I'm sorry it actually became necessary, I definitely feel vindicated about being concerned about subscriptions or cloud lock-in. If this same thing was happening with that it'd be a lot worse.

TP-Link Omada is effectively a UniFi clone and I mean that in the relatively nice sense. They also offer a centralized controller that you can selfhost. I think it's clear who they're gunning after a bit. And it is in many respects rougher being relatively new. The physical design of the hardware is a lot worse which does indeed matter. The product lines are confusing despite having far less old junk. It doesn't have certain cool useful niche hardware. Their build system clearly needs work, Linux release of a given version sometimes randomly lags awhile behind the Windows version for no clear reason. Etc. Even so, the trajectory is very much better. They've made more improvements and added more important functionality in a year then Ubiquiti has in 4. The networks are more reliable and less quirky so far. TP-Link just this year added PPSK capability, which is super useful for networks with a lot of BYOD including all the massive numbers of electronics that don't support WPA-Enterprise or even those that do but have miserable onboarding without some paid solution. People hacked together a proof of concept on UniFi of that over 3 years ago, which Ubiquiti then never bothered with since.

Again, I haven't "switched" entirely yet, except in terms of 100% of routing moving to OPNsense from USGs over the last few years which I've been very happy with. I did one small scale Omada replacement and was satisfied, and just finished a much larger replacement which I'm going to kick the tires on for a while before ripping out the rest of my UniFi gear and moving on for good. So I'm not at the point of strongly recommending it to anyone yet. And it's worth noting too that we're on the very of seeing WiFi 7 kit start to roll out and that is an unusually big deal, since it'll probably be the place where we're really going to see 6 GHz uptake (6E ended up being a bit of a placeholder there). We may never see another big new chunk of spectrum like that released again. So there is good reason to see how that transition is handled over the next 6-9 months anyway.

But with all those caveats I'm still much more bullish on Omada now in the "self-hosted centrally controlled no-dependency switching/wifi network stack" category and happy there is even direct competition for UniFi at all. The concept is solid and the potential was huge, the execution has just been abysmal for a while though is all :(. I'd love if they changed course still but at this point I don't think that can happen unless the company goes through some major challenges. If you don't actually care about avoiding cloud dependencies, more control, or larger scaling/running herd and the like though there are other good options to look like Aruba Instant-On or even various mesh choices, Amazon's Eero offers surprisingly strong performance for the price for example. Lots of stuff is at least better then what most ISPs offer :).