TP Link Omada and Unifi compared

tom here from orange systems we're going to talk about tp-link omada and unify software-defined networking so tp-link is a newer competitor in the software-defined networking market with the armada it's actually been around for a little while but it hasn't been as popular as unifi with their latest 4.0 version they really ramped it up and made a system that looks dramatically like unify and of course they're being opportunistic there's been a few missteps in the unifi ecosystem i guess you could say that has angered some of the fan base angered some of their customers and said hey let's look at alternatives and i went ahead and checked out the tp link and i did a full review of the system when we initially got it did some testing with it and now a few weeks later of using it at my house i'd say it's been very reliable for a home networking setup with the exception of the firewall their firewall is as bad as unified we'll get into the details in a second but i wanted to do a comparison of these two products and kind of lay them out side by side now before we dive into all the details if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to laurentsystems.com if you'd like to hire a sharp project there's a hires button up at the top if you would like to just reach out and contact me hit me up on twitter or head over to our forums great way to engage now let's first talk about software-defined networking and the way the two products line up first we're going to look at the unified product line and they offer a large series of switches and wi-fi access points so there's quite a bit that's been around for a while in the unified platform that it all merges into it and most everything that says unify on it versus ubiquity the company name is part of their system that works with their software-defined networking and it's not too hard to find these devices they were available on amazon and unifi has really been pushing for a direct sales model as of late then you have the unifi controller options which is the unified dream machine or the dream machine pro these are the integrated firewall and controller software and one device and then they have some of the recommended things on here and of course they also have their cloud key which is a hardware device to be able to manage the software-defined networking on now the omada has something very similar so if we go over to the omada we have a much more limited as of right now list of devices and we have the ap 660 620 265 and that's really it these top ones right here for a few indoor models and then we have one outdoor model the ac 1200 then we have just a couple different switches so as of right now here in april of 2021 there are not a lot of options but these are all the devices that are compatible on there and like i said i did a full review and i break these down in my other video and they have two different firewall options and oh yeah like i said they copied unifi to the point of making not so great firewalls so let's actually dive into some of the features though that both of these have that are alike now you can on both of these platforms download the software to find network controller and host it yourself without any registration now where the difference is and this is where tp-link really took advantage if you get the oc 200 oc 300 which is the cloud controller the hardware device from tp-link that will host their software-defined networking you do not have to register with the tp link at all with their cloud registration with unifi they made some changes here in 2021 that angered much of the community as i alluded to and specifically around forced registration this is now part of the dream machine series the the cloud keys and it's just not something i think is necessary i like it as an option if you want to use their cloud to be able to remotely manage this but i don't think it should be necessary but you know if i made that decision and so this will you know split the market a little bit on that particular topic but both unifi and tp-link still offer their self-hosted version without forced registration so i just want to make sure that parts clear because that does come up they go well are they going to change it on the self-hosted version if you you know roll your own server doesn't look like it i don't think they would because they have a lot of people that are in my category which is the it and managed service provider space that are using these now both of these allow for the hosting of clients controllers in our stack so we have a server that we host all the unify systems on we have all the clients in the list unify makes this really really easy to do with their controller and of course there's companies such as hostify that riley chase put together that offers hosting of the controller software so i think that market they don't want to disrupt they don't mind disrupting the end user market with unifi but the other bigger markets that are the msp market and you know we've installed a lot of these at scale and have a lot of these systems that we manage i don't think they're going to make changes to that but hey this is one of the reasons we keep an eye on new products now armada does have a similar system where you can do that type of hosting i couldn't find anyone that really i know that's tested at a scale i've seen some comments from people when i did the tp link review video but i couldn't reach out to any of the other msps i know that were talking about large scale installs but a lot of people seemed happy with it and my experience of testing it at my house is it held up really well now a couple things that these guys offer that's really cool is simple wireless management these are some of the reasons these platforms are so popular now for example on the unify side this is what the wireless management looks like we can define different wireless networks and this propagates to all the devices adopted switch over here to the omada side pretty much the same thing here the omada i wish offered the dark mode i left it on dark mode to easily distinguish between ubiquity and omada but other than that offering dark mode when you start going through these settings you realize they look very very similar now let's look at the vlans here at the omada and you see i have one vlan defined at my home that i was set up for testing vlan 123 shows the id we have the lan the main interface that i have set up on my house using the omada and pretty simple when you define this all the devices that are adopted network get this vlan information so you can apply it and apply it to each port go over here to the unify this is our office network we have more vlans to find but essentially we have an extremely similar menu system and it makes it really easy so if i want to apply vlan tag 50 we'll go over here to a device just hit device and we'll choose a switch and then just edit a port on the switch and we can simply choose any of those defined vlans that are in that list now let's look at how that works over at the omada we look at the switch we go to ports and we'll use a port not news hit edit and there's our easy123 vlan really similar the way both of them work side by side so a lot of the decision becomes a little bit difficult because tp-linked did such a good copy job i would say because unifi had this was popularized this kind of easy pull-down method that makes defining a vlan easy that makes it so you don't have to go and message each switch and make sure the configurations are tied together as you adopt them into the network they all just follow suit and have this option applied to every switch in your network and i think this is a really great system it does make for easy management of course this makes for remote management so you can have the controller at a separate location from the actual site where these are being managed in our case many of our clients like this so if we needed to look at a port see if it's active see what the stats are on that port both of these softwares offer that same solution now this is where there is a big variation though in how they adopt things onto the network and it's unusual that for all the copying that tplink did they didn't copy this feature so right here i've got a device plugged in to the tp link and it's on the same lan as the tp-link so i have it on the 172 network this is actually on the 172 network as well so it sees it and ready for adoption so all i have to do is go here and hit adopt and it'll adopt this into the network and become part of all the other devices on here now in unify the way that works and we'll go over here to settings then we'll go to controller in unify you would set this right here so it says omada.lawrentsystem.com no this isn't public publicly accessible we set this up internally as a demo but when we move it over to different networks that have access to it it doesn't push the controller hostname ip name this is a variation from the way that it's done with unify with unify you set your controller and hostname and then when you adopt devices and for example when we adopt them here in our local controller then we send them out in the field to a client they're phoning home to the proper entry the tp-link chose not to do that so even though they have a spot to define it that isn't where you actually set it you actually have to log into each device such as a firewall or switch and adopt them by putting in where the controller is tell it to adopt now before you do that you have to log into these because each one of the tp-link devices can be a standalone or can work with the controller software this is also a variation from unifi which unify if you buy one of their wi-fi access points or their firewalls it only allows for adoption and or switches into their system to work it doesn't have a standalone web interface but because they do have a web interface you roughly got to set it up just got to log in and create a username and password then you go over and go to the controller section in these and push the settings into the controller that tell it where the omada controller is and that's how you can adopt them when they're not on the same network when they're on the same network they can discover each other but this is a little bit more tedious because i can set up 20 unifies plug them all in the same network hit adopt on all 20 of them and send them out in the field whether they're firewalls whether they're unifi access points or unified switches mostly we don't use the firewalls more on that in a moment but that is a easy way to do it omada has kind of an easy way of going into each device or you can use the omada discovery tool which only adopts their wi-fi units and point them so you can set it up i found that software kind of buggy because it only works with oracle java but i did test it you can do it that way and it does have a bulk option so it's it's okay it does that now related to that is figuring out all the ports that it used i found the documentation absolutely lacking on tp-link but being it's a newer product and not as mature as the unified platform i think that's just going to happen there's also the confusion because if you go backwards to their version 3 versus their version 4 software there's some wild differences in the way it works unifi has incrementally changed their system and of course now they have some of the newer interface that they're working on but overall there's a pretty longer path that they've had so there's a lot more documentation for the unifi available on their website a lot more details because well the products plugs have been around a lot longer now let's get to the firewall this is where tp links shouldn't have copied at all i don't get it they copied the firewall and they copied the problems that come with firewalls from ubiquity and the the problems are just mind numbing to me in 2021 why you would do this for example let's set up a block of ips on a wan address yeah they decided to copy that same flaw from unified either unifi for years has had requests and someone will probably point out in the comments that it's in beta right now a beta feature to allow you to have a block of ips assigned to the wan i can't believe that's a beta feature on a company that claims to be enterprise or even business oriented at all because for home users yeah you're probably only going to have one ip on the way but for any of the business users this starts becoming a problem when you have it you know just you want two or three i p addresses well there's ways to do it but there's not any official ways to assign them but they do allow you a little bit different in tp-link versus unified to build multiple wan ports on there now they do support failover so i'll give them that but the failover is buggy to say the least i haven't done much failover testing with tv link but i'm gonna go with it's still not great it's not granular it gives you very few options it's kind of a you get what you get and there's very little control over it the basicness that are firewalls is also related to vpns they just don't give you much in a way of vpns or policy routing so if you wanted to do site-to-site vpns are kind of neat but that's it if you have two sites both running the unifi or both running tp-link which i haven't tested but tp-link claims to support this but when you have them together which you end up with is the ability to say hey take this site and this site and have them talk to each other it's actually a really neat feature i think unify has but it's a neat feature it's not the killer app feature and more people want better you know remote user vpn support and better support overall for remote user vpn there's some variations between them but both of them i wouldn't recommend to anyone that needs solid vpn support something like a pf sensor is going to handle that better something like untangle is going to handle that better so neither one of these companies i really think is good for the firewall and by the way for me taking these home and doing my testing which that's why those other devices i don't have here such as the aesthetically not pleasing large eap 620 hd that i'm not sure why they made it so big i have that at my house right now but i do not have the firewall there because i just couldn't bring myself to use this firewall at my house with the lack of features i need some of the vpn support to be able to get back into my house and uh those shortcomings mean to me whether it's unifi or tp-link i wouldn't use either firewall but some final decisions here for those of you wanting to know now because i just don't have the track record with tp-link i don't know that i'd recommend this for a large-scale business install maybe we'll try one out in some of the smaller businesses that are looking just for some basic access and see how it goes i'm going to keep running this to my house so i can keep gathering data because the experiments at my house of swapping everything and no one at my house even noticing went well the range is good i had no problem with the roaming between devices so it worked as good as the unify stuff that i was using at my house prior to moving it over to tp-link so for home users i don't see any problem recommending this like this is stuff i would definitely recommend for a home user even the firewalls i think for a home user who just says i just need internet access and you know the kids want to be able to be online i think tp links solid for that i've said the same about unifi if you just want to get online you don't care much about some of those other features like home user stuff great now the home lab people you're probably going to want a better firewall your the home lab and business of course is going to be more interested in you know let's say whole home vpns or policy routing or some of the more advanced things that you want to mess with in your home lab the firewall is going to leave you disappointed from both of these companies but the wireless access and the switches i think are pretty reasonable especially if you're on a budget for the home lab stuff the overall doesn't feel quite as polished on the tp link and the offerings are a little bit narrower they don't have as many 10 gig options but the budget-oriented nature of it and so far from what other people have told me overall they've been reliable and i think that's good i just don't know anyone who's installed them at massive scale to see if there's problems or bugs in it but a lot of the homeland people that did talk to that i know of going yeah i've had one for a while it actually works pretty good so i think that's a good recommendation over on the home lab side the other advantage that is going to be with tp-link is the fact that you can get some deals on amazon you can get fast shipping and unify um with them moving everything towards direct sales and away from amazon i feel the prices went up a little bit more than it used to be so this can kind of be challenging and unifies not being favorable to resellers anymore like they were matter of fact there's not a ton of resellers of the unified equipment because if you are a large-scale reseller of it you know the margins are like really small on the devices unifies not much for discounts but my overall unify i mean having deployed it at scale having put a lot of these out there we've found their wireless access points to be very very reliable we found their switches to be very reliable over time that we've got these installs and this goes back years i mean we've finally replaced a couple of them from a client we installed back in 2013 the only reason we upgraded is because they did some building upgrades and wanted to get off the old 2.4 stuff we installed in 2013. nothing wrong with the devices other than a couple leds were really dim or burned out that was actually a known issue in some of the earlier models they would keep working but the led ring on those would be you know not too bright or even not working at all but the device itself worked perfectly fine so those are my thoughts on this i'll leave a link to the videos i've done on unifi i have a playlist for that and i'll leave a link to the tp link omada that i did the review on and some of the hardware on there but my overall thoughts on it like i said it seems pretty good hardware on both sides on there but firewalls sorry i'm gonna have to drop both of them on there so hopefully this helps if you're looking at building out uh some of your gear in your home lab or thinking about it for business and if you're someone who has and want to talk a little bit more in depth that from a business standpoint have used the multi-controller at scale then that'd be great to talk to and also security if anyone can give me some issues with tp-link or understand them better because there's still some questions i have like having telnet enabled and things like that i don't find any flaws in it but they also don't have a bug bounty program so any of the security people i've reached out to so far since i my initial review have no interest in really looking at it because they look at it as you know not a lot of value in it because it's kind of a home user thing so they're not really looking to attack it there's no bug bounding program as opposed to ubiquity they do have a bug bounty program so i've known some of them who have taken some real you know hard looks at it and i've talked about before some of the flaws and the adoption that were discovered from unified but it's not arbitrary there's actually some security built into unify and it's been vetted way more than tp-link really not as clear on this but i also don't see them incentivizing security reachers to poke out their stuff so if you are security who has poked at it or interested in it if i can give you remote access or you know help you out and that contact me hit me up on twitter let me know all right thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a shared project head over to lawrences.com and click on the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thank you again and we look forward to hearing from you in the meantime check out some of our other videos you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 69,034

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, tp link omada, unifi, usg, unif, tp linkomada, tp link omada sdn controller, tp link omada vs unifi, unifi sdn, unifi access point, unifi access point setup, unifi access point installation, unifi access point comparison, unifi access point placement, unifi access point setup with controller, tp link access point, tp link access point setup, ubiquiti unifi, best wifi

Id: tjtxDcKCZ18

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021

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[u/Lumute]

Didn't TP-Link at some point blatantly copied the code of some old version of the Unifi controller changing some logos, etc.?

Literally looks like a rip off. Now, don't get me wrong, if they do a good job I'm all up for competition but it also looks like they copied all the flaws plus some of their own...

Unifi is so frustrating! The concept and the hardware are amazing, if they only spent the time adding the features everyone is asking vs wasting time on GUI changes no one asked for or even like.

I'm starting to force myself to use the new GUI just because I will have to anyway at some point and keep thinking it's one of those things that grow into you once you give it a chance but honestly the more I use it the more I hate it...

[u/C_Turtle23]

Considering TP Link is a Chinese rip-off of Ubiquiti, the answer should be obvious...

[u/RyoOfWildFire]

Man TP Link must be going after Unifi's business hard. This is about the fourth or fifth one of these videos I've seen where TP Link sends a YouTuber their gear and asks them to do the review.

Considering how far downhill Ubiquiti has been going I know a lot of people were looking for alternatives. I dumped my UXG Pro after having it a year and getting absolutely no new features, slim to no development (four firmware updates in a year that did little else than close a few CVEs) and a seeming abandonment of the product.

I've since moved on to an OPNSense box and am very happy with it and am considering replacing the rest of the Unifi setup with something else. The breach and whistleblower situation should make everyone nervous - particularly the part where they covered up how bad the breach was for months.

[u/Blankaccount111]

I mean we saw a while back tp-link was copying ubiquity. Now it looks like they just went to their Chinese manufacturers and just said slap a new label on their Ubiquity stuff and we are gonna sell it.