Opinions hooboy do I have them ;), I was just asked that exact question on HN a couple of weeks ago in fact. Gave it a shot in a response here [0] which still applies. But basically Ubiquiti has become a toxic dumpster fire of a company and their product lines (UniFi in particular) on a downward trajectory in terms of performance, features and stability for quite a while. I had a certain amount invested in UniFi (think the final total will end up as a few hundred devices) so it's been a staged switch, with a total change of all routing/gateway/security functions to OPNsense completed first. That bought a lot more runway, it's always been the weakest and most neglected area in the ecosystem while obviously also being pretty critical. Yet the Ubiquiti debacle has served to underline for me how valuable self-host is, I've been able to have a nice slow ramp and deal with their implosion precisely because UniFi/UNMS/UISP and all the hardware is fully under my control. So I've been hoping someone would come along and see the potential of the UniFi niche of the networking market and basically copy it without all the junk. Which seems to basically be Omada to a tee.

I'd actually originally (and still at many sites) intended to hold off and wait for WiFi 7 gear, because at that point a bunch of clients (and myself for that matter) will be interested in replacing WAPs anyway which is a very natural point to consider changing manufacturer as well. But a breaking point has come at a few places with a final feature which is PPSK, allowing the system to have many different passwords for an SSID that can be assigned different tags. Basically it allows having many of the benefits of WPA-Enterprise in terms of segmenting different clients onto different VLANs and revoking credentials and the like with more security and less manual work than MAB (MAC bypass) while still looking like a normal PSK scheme, which means the vast universe of brand new stuff which doesn't support 802.1x and never will works with it happily (by the same token none of that is going to play directly with using a secure virtual network or other better systems either sadly). Lower overhead and better compatibility than captive portals for non or semi-interactive devices as well. Someone hacked together a demo showing this could work on UniFi WAPs like four freaking years ago and Ubiquiti never did anything with it in favor of endless bikeshedding GUI changes to add more white space and hide important features and information (yes I'm a touch bitter).

So I'm not in the position of wholeheartedly recommending Omada yet, I don't have years under my belt there and it's relatively speaking fairly new. It has its own warts and rough edges for sure, from the software to the hardware physical design. But it can be self-hosted and the trajectory looks massively better, has already had more meaningful improvement in months than UniFi has had in years, seems to perform much better so far as well.

Of course the Venn diagram of self-hosting, herding lots of hardware with single pane, fully networking features, ecosystem richness and so on is pretty minimal in the overlap. Take away any one or multiple of those and options expand a lot, Aruba InstantOn for example.

And welp, this didn't end up "basically" at all did it, sorry about that. I am bummed by the sheer wasted potential with Ubiquiti. So it goes in tech over and over again though, we've all seen this movie many, many times.

As far as tips, I would suggest if you plan to stay on the managing-your-own-networks route to very strongly consider having the router/gateway stuff be separate and fully open source as I ended up. Doesn't have to be OPNsense, could be VyOS or plain OpenBSD or whatever else you're most comfortable with and depending on how you want to manage stuff and what needs there are for others to take over. But it's very, very pleasant to have the full spectrum of quality PC hardware available, you can get far more power for less, and you're never stuck with a critical aspect. I'd still suggest generally running that on metal rather than virtualizing it in a (semi)production network, but opinions vary there.

----

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297556