tp-link Omada - Complete Overview

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name's chris and today we're going to be taking a look at all of this equipment that i've got here on my desk this is some of the latest offerings from tp-link and it is their omada line of products now what exactly does that mean well basically these are like prosumer grade products so on the lower end the consumer grade products are going to be like your netgear nighthawk and the sort of all-in-one combo devices that have your router firewall access point switch basically combined into one unit then the next step up is gonna be something like the prosumer unify stuff that we see from ubiquiti inc or something like this tp-link omada where instead of having everything combined into you know one little appliance you have a little bit more flexibility over the equipment that you purchase for a more prosumer or bigger network by purchasing components individually so the access points are separate the switches are separate the router firewall is a separate unit and all of it's controlled by a piece of software it's like sdn or software defined networking and we're going to get into all of that in this video we're going to go over this equipment that tp-link sent me we're going to talk about the topology of a software-defined network we're going to talk about the omada interface and all of the features that it has we're also going to talk about sort of the big question which is is this a viable replacement for ubiquiti's unify equipment in terms of pricing as well as feature set all right we're going to talk about all of that in this video we're going to cram in as much of that as we possibly can but of course your comments are always welcome and put those comments down below also if you haven't already this is the perfect time to hit that like button as well as subscribe to crosstalk solutions for more content just like this if you want to just buy me a beer too there's a link for that down below so now let's hop into the equipment that tp-link sent me i do want to be clear about that up front all of this equipment that you see here with the exception of these network cables was provided by tp-link uh free of cost to me in order to review and evaluate these products but of course my opinion cannot be bought with free equipment all of my opinions and evaluations of these products are as if i had purchased them myself so let's start from the top down here right on top here we have this little guy here this is the tp-link omada cloud controller this is like their hardware controller for the omada software basically this runs the software that controls all of this various equipment and you can buy this oc 200 controller which supports up to 100 omada devices or you can buy the oc 300 controller which supports up to 500 omada devices alternatively you don't need the hardware controller you can install a software controller on an existing you know pc or server or you can use tp-link's cloud the amata cloud all of it will do the same thing all of the pricing that i'm going to talk about is basically how these things are priced on amazon today and there's going to be links to all of this equipment down below those are affiliate links if you click on them it doesn't change your price but it does get us a couple bucks for the referral and we certainly appreciate any referrals that we get the oc 200 hardware controller on amazon as of today is 83.92 and what we get here is basically two ethernet ports and a usb port and a reset switch so the ethernet ports are for connecting this controller to a switch as you can see there's no power so it is poe powered off of the switch down here on the bottom and then the usb dongle that i have in here is for backups so if you want to set the device to auto backup it can back up to this whatever usb stick you have sticking in here and we'll cover all of that sort of stuff when we look at the actual amada interface the higher end version of this same device the oc 300 is actually 159.99 that's the one that can can control up to 500 omada devices whereas this one is rated to control up to 100 omada devices the next thing here is our router firewall now this is a weird device it seems to have two model numbers i've seen it referred to as the er 605 i've also seen it referred to as the tl-r605 but regardless this is your router firewall and vpn device sort of the the head of the network and this device is 59.95 on amazon and what you get are one gigabit wan port one gigabit lan port and then these three ports in the middle you can configure those as either when or lan they do make an alternative version of this so again this one is 59.99 on amazon they make one sort of the next model up is 149.99 on amazon and it includes a gigabit wan sfp plus port and it's also just like way more powerful like more powerful cpu more ram more internal storage etc uh this is sort of the bottom of the line one the next one up is is actually pretty powerful the specs are pretty impressive now below that we have the first of two switches that we're going to be taking a look at this switch for this setup i actually really didn't need there this is a 5 port 2.5 gigabit unmanaged switch and when i say unmanaged it means it does not show up in the omada interface whatsoever it's a completely dumb switch it's literally just there to provide 2.5 gigabit connectivity to whatever devices happen to need it now none of the devices here have 2.5 gigabit capability so really i have the switch plugged in but i'm i'm literally not using it at all now below that we have the actual managed switch so this is model number tl-sg2210mp and this switch is an eight port gigabit switch with two sfp ports as well so it's basically 10 ports total eight gigabit ethernet and two gigabit sfp now these are sfp not sfp plus but tp-link has like a ton of switches i think you've got like 10 or 12 different switches that you can pick from all the way from sort of lower end you know five and eight port gigabit switches all the way up to higher end switches that have 10 gig sfp plus ports and you know 48 ports worth of connectivity that sort of stuff so they have basically a switch for anything that you could possibly need this switch here as i said has eight uh ports they are all poe capable so it's eight 802.3 af at poe plus ports and you can have a total poe budget of 150 watts from this switch all right plugged into this switch we have two axis points we have this big old access point right here as you can see it is it is actually quite large it's about the about the size of my head around this is the eap 620 this is a 2x2 multi-user mimo wi-fi 6 access point poe powered as you can see but they also include a power brick so if you don't have a poe switch this does come with a power adapter that you can plug in so wi-fi 6 as i mentioned the port on this is just a gigabit port so it is not a 2.5 or multi-gigabit port on the back of this device as far as the antenna configuration of this device it's got a 4 dbi antenna in the 2.4 gigahertz and a 5 dbi antenna in the 5 gigahertz with a gain and 10 a gain of 25 dbm in both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and i ran this thing through its paces we will see how this access point stacks up in our crosstalk access point benchmarking a little bit later in this video additionally we have this in-wall access point uh this is actually a pretty great value so if you wanted to extend networking to a room that maybe couldn't pick up a signal from one of these larger access points this is 49.99 so it's 49.99 it's not wi-fi six this is wi-fi five but it's a nice little unit it's poe powered in the back and then you've got two standard ports uh down at the bottom two standard gigabit ethernet ports and then a third that is gigabit ethernet as well as poe out so for instance if you wanted to plug in a voice over ip phone uh this would be perfect for that like if you had this in an office where you're pue powering the tp-link in-wall access point and then you're separately powering a you know a voip phone off of this access point as well again 49.99 this is the eap 225 dash wall and it's two by two multi-user mimo but again it's wi-fi five not wi-fi 6. let's take a quick look at the tp-link omada topology if you are familiar with similar types of devices such as the unified line of products this is going to be nothing new for you however if you're used to more of the consumer sort of all-in-one devices you might not understand how all of these different bits fit together so let's go ahead and go over that very quickly if you're in that consumer world typically here's your internet out here you're going to have a modem from your isp and then right here you're gonna have your you know your linksys router or your netgear router with the antennas on it you know and everything sort of all in one device and this is it like that's your whole network you just connect your wireless clients wirelessly and your wired clients to the back of this device when we're talking about the sort of next level up the prosumer grade hardware such as tp-link omada we're taking all of the functions that are crammed into that one little box and we're separating them out so that we have more control and more flexibility over the design of our network so in this case my firewall router is the er605 that's the device and basically that is just the edge of my network on this side of the firewall is the wan or wide area network the internet and on the inside of this device is the lan or local area network typically you might run some devices plugged directly into the firewall but in most cases if i were designing something i wouldn't have client devices in the firewall i would only hang other switches off of the firewall so that's what we have down here so the two switches that i have are this tl sg2210mp at 157.49 and then the two five port 2.5 gigabits which is the tl sg 105 m2 at 139 bucks so basically both of those we would string directly off of the router firewall and the switch configuration that you have is gonna vary greatly based on the devices that you have right if you have a lot of wired devices you're gonna want a switch that has more ports in it but if most of your clients are going to be connecting wirelessly to an access point then maybe something like this 8 port gigabit switch with poe might be plenty powerful for you they even make one that's eight ports where only four of the ports are poe so for instance if you only had two access points and that was all of the poe devices in your house you might wanna opt for that one it's gonna be a little bit more cost effective so plugged into the switches we're gonna have a number of things first we're going to have our wired devices so any computer or television or you know nintendo switch or whatever that has a hardwired connection it's always best to hard wire where you can where you can't hardwire that's where we're going to plug in our access points and in this case i have two access points i have the eap620 that is the 2x2 multi-user mimo wi-fi 6 access point and then i have the in-wall eap225 actually the model is eap 225-wall at 49.99 that's the wi-fi five or 802.11 ac is the technical name for that technology access point that can go in wall and it also has a few wired ports on the bottom connected to those access points are going to be all of our wireless clients our roku and our sonos systems and our laptops and ipads and iphones and android devices whatever you happen to have that connects wirelessly is going to connect to that access point the access point is plugged hardwired into one of your switches then the other thing that we have out here connected with power over ethernet is the oc 200 tp-link omada hardware controller this is the brains of the operation this is where we run the omada software that controls all of the settings and gives us visibility into the network such as our wired devices our wireless devices the bandwidth that we're using all of the configuration settings for all of these devices that's all found in the hardware controller and the hardware controller as i said earlier you don't have to have this box the oc 200 box or the oc 300 box if you have a ton of devices the controller can be cloud-based in tp-links cloud you can self-install it on like a windows machine or maybe a linux server i'm not exactly sure how you can self-install it i hadn't looked into that part of it or you can buy the hardware controller which is what i have next we're going to take a look at the tp-link software itself so this is the dashboard of tp-link omada now i have logged into this locally with local administrative credentials however if you like you can also enable cloud credentials that allow you to log in to tp-link omada with you know through the cloud with your omada cloud login there is also a tp-link omada app that you can put on your phone and from what i found the app is very fully featured compared to what you can do in the desktop interface so i'm not going to cover the app in much detail specifically but just know that there is an app that allows you to make basically most of the settings that you can see in the actual desktop interface so right here at the top of the dashboard we get some summary information you can run speed tests and figure out how much capacity you're currently using of your internet connection we also have some switches two eaps online eight clients online and if we disconnected any of these devices it would show that one of the devices is disconnected down below we also have some pre-configured dashboards now i've adjusted this one a little bit but you can see we have an overall dashboard a network dashboard a client's dashboard and then we can add additional dashboards if we want the desktop or the dashboard of tp-link omada is actually surprisingly configurable and i thought that was really refreshing so again we can add our own dashboard if we want sure would right and then if we click on this dashboard we can click settings and then go through all of these different widgets down here and add various widgets to the dashboard and then of course rearrange them and and however we want to see everything so we have widgets for network stuff alerts most active clients most active switches you know client distribution among access points all sorts of good stuff here that you can see many many many different statistics for network stuff and client stuff so we're starting off pretty good i like the dashboard of tp-link omada and for anyone asking i have not yet found a dark mode so for all of you dark mode folks out there so far it doesn't seem like that's a possibility but i do like the dashboard in general going down the side here we have statistics now statistics are going to show you for your access points your router your switches you got performance statistics switch statistics speed test statistics and then of course within each of these different categories you can drop down to your different devices and and see specific information such as user account usage percentages you know traffic etc for all of your various omada devices if you click on map we get a topology map of all of our stuff here so we can see here's my router here's the switch that i've got we've got my two access points plugged into the switch as well as the omada controller and then we have clients in the switch as well and you can of course drill down into those clients if you like we can see that i've got two devices that are wirelessly connected to the eap 620 access point and i've got four devices that are wired uh into this client group here you can also do a regular map so if you want to upload a map of your office or your location and then you can put devices onto the map and see where everything's located now one thing that this map doesn't have that would be really nice is if you could scale the map and then show the approximate coverage radius of the access points that's always very useful information to see and in this case it looks like you can put your devices on the map but there's really no way to actually show like what the wireless coverage of any of your access points is going to be if we click on devices of course we're going to see us all sorts of information about our devices and if you click on any individual device the information tray pops out from the right hand side where you can check out the various networks that you're connected to then we have config which gives you the name of the device various services such as snmp lldp hardware offload and then you can manage the device which means you know give it a custom firmware file move it between different omada sites uh or forget it off of this site entirely and again for those people who are familiar with the way that this stuff is done in unifi this is gonna be really really familiar because it's almost it's almost exactly a unified clone that they've built into tp-link omada speaking of different sites you do have a site manager up here so you can switch you can add additional sites to your omada controller sites would be like if you had different business locations you would want each one to be its own site or if you were managing multiple clients you would want each of your various clients to have their own site in the omada controller they also have this hotspot manager which if you click on it it gives you some information about uh you know if you're using the hotspot or voucher functionality it will give you information about authorized clients vouchers local users operators etc it seems to be like a pretty full featured hotspot voucher mechanism built into the omada software if we click on any of our access points we can also see some information about the lan as well as the up link we can see information about the radios clients that are connected and then we have the configuration of the access point such as the ip address this is actually kind of nice you can set the ip address to dhcp but then set up a fallback ip so that if if for any reason the access point is unable to get a dhcp ip address it can then get this fallback ip address so basically you can kind of set a static ip address on the device that it'll fall back to if the dhcp work server isn't working for some reason radios now as far as radios go the only change that i made when i do testing of these you know benchmark testing of these access points i always set the channel width to the maximum in this case the maximum channel width on the wi-fi 6 access point is 80 megahertz everything else i just leave to auto or high then we have wlan so you can create various wlan groups which is you know just basically a set of ssids that are sort of grouped together in case you want different ssids showing up in the cafeteria versus the library type of thing then under services we can enable a management vlan we have some information about snmp for this particular device and advanced shows us some advanced function managed device gives you all the same stuff for moving it between sites for getting the device manually upgrading firmware etc etc and again apologies if i'm brushing through this really quick but there's just so much to cover in an interface like this i want to make sure i kind of touch on everything even if it's just a little bit okay so there's our devices you can also click on clients and clients is going to show you all of your clients clicking on insights gives us some reporting such as known clients past connections past portal authorizations if we're using their hotspot functionality as well as any information on rogue access points that are found in the network finally we have our log which is going to show us our alerts and events and notifications okay down here for admin this is where you can add admin users and notice that i've got two admin users i've got the main administrator which is a local account and then i've got my cloud main administrator which is my omada connected cloud account so i can use either one of these logins to log into the local controller or if i want to log into the cloud controller for instance if i'm not on site i can log into the cloud controller using my cloud main administrator all right next let's take a brush through the settings here is our site configuration we can call this whatever we want such as crosstalk office something like that now it has these application scenarios hotel restaurant shopping mall airport office factory this is something that it has you pick when you first log into the device and i'm not actually sure what this does there's probably some sort of templating scenario templating that you can do let's see if we create a new scenario crosstalk create but see like what can you do with that now that i've created this scenario like what do you actually do with it i'm not really sure and i didn't take enough i didn't take any time to investigate that function below that we have just some general settings such as enabling alert emails uh turning on or off the device leds enabling automatic upgrades uh and you can see everything else that's here all right let's click on wired networks so wired networks is first going to allow us to control um the ports on our firewall so if you recall the firewall had one lan port one lan port and then the three ports in between were configurable they were either lan or when well this is where you would actually set that up if you wanted to enable multiple lan ports you are multiple wan ports excuse me you can have up to four wands plugged into the the firewall model that i have and if we click on switch settings we can edit our switch ports and we can assign for instance a specific untagged vlan or a specific vlan to a port that will then become untagged on that particular port so example we got port 5 here i can edit it and i can say port 5's profile is the iot vlan meaning that anything plugged into port number 5 is going to be natively on that network that vlan without having even if that device doesn't understand vlan tagging if we click on wireless networks here we have all of our wireless network settings we can see i have one network called wi-fi six we can enable or disable either the 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz band we can give it a guess network there's also very helpful pop-up help throughout the interface here which is nice anytime you see this little eye with the circle around it and then we can pick our security and password if we go to our advanced settings we can choose what type of security we're using in this case i'm using a wpa2 psk slash wpa3 sae mixed mode security meaning that it will do wpa3 if the device connecting has that capability otherwise it does wpa2 and then there's all sorts of different options here so we can do some rate limiting and then set that for either the download or the upload limit on a particular wireless network there's also another place where we can do that but you can choose whether to limit the per client to a specific bandwidth or the aggregate of all clients on a specific wireless network are limited to a certain amount of bandwidth which i think is a really really nice feature we can enable or disable our wireless lan schedule here we've got some rate control stuff and as well as mac filtering and for mac filtering you can basically have a deny list as in don't allow these mac addresses or an allow list which is only allow these mac addresses to connect to this wireless network and to do that you would create a mac address group and then add whatever mac addresses are allowed or denied into that group and then select the group right here network security is going to show us our access control list for the gateway the switch or the access points you've got different access control lists for gateway firewall switch or access point you can do url filtering so this is kind of interesting you can create rules for like deny specific urls uh that people are going to be browsing to although it doesn't seem to have a you know where you can import a list of bad urls or something like that this isn't like an ds or open dns or like pie hole type of service but it's a way to block specific urls from being used and you can use wildcard so if you wanted to do their example is if you wanted to block out star.google.com you could do that or if you want to block out star.facebook.com you could do that right here then we have some attack defense stuff this is probably like dns ddos excuse me you know intrusion detection type stuff if we click on transmission this is where you can add static routes nat of course allows you to set up your port forwarding and alg a sip alg by the way is enabled by default i disabled it in here and if we click on session limit session limit allows you to set up rules for limiting sessions you know that can be active on any of your networks at any given time and then here we have bandwidth control so you see this one that i set up for limiting uh internet of things so you can say limit iot that's the name we're enabling this rule for this specific network which is my id iot network for anything in the idea iot network going out to the when i want a maximum of 10 megabits we could say it's in kilobits we could say 10 megabits download and one megabit upload and then you can choose is that for all devices in that network or just for each individual device in that network how are we limiting it so i really like that a lot actually that you can basically say hey we're going to enable like for a guest network if you wanted a guest network to be you know bandwidth limited to like five megabits by two megabits is that per client or is that for the entire guest network vpn allows you to create vpn policies if you have multiple sites in omada that you want to link together with vpn it's as simple as basically choosing site-to-site vpn and then selecting the second site that you want to connect to or you can select client-to-site vpn if you want to cre establish a vpn tunnel with another you know non-omada device if you wanted to create a you know vpn tunnel to a cisco firewall or something this is where you would set that up then we have our profiles and groups these are basically used in various places throughout the omada interface so for instance i set up our business hours time group which is weekdays between 8 am to 6 pm and we'll see where that's used in just a second you can also click on groups and this is where you can create different types of groups ipgroups port groups or mac address groups right so remember we talked about the mac address filtering this is where you would add all of the mac addresses that you want to allow or deny onto any particular wireless network next we have a portal so this is their captive portal stuff which is actually pretty fully featured you can see i turned it on it does tell us though that having the controller online for the captive portal is required meaning that you have to your clients have to be able to see the omada interface or the amada controller whether that's in the cloud in self-installed or one of these hardware controllers your clients do have to be able to see that device for the hotspot or portal functionality to work you can choose which ssid you're tying the portal to what type of authentication including simple password radius hotspot authentication facebook authentication what's the timeout values then of course you can customize the landing page and also do access control stuff down here so again fully featured i did not test any of this hotspot functionality out right so i didn't test out a lot of this stuff mostly i'm just showing you guys what exists in the interface and if you have real world experience with how the tp-link omada stuff actually functions put that down in the comments because that's going to be super helpful for people that are evaluating this solution then we have some 802.1x you know radius authentication stuff you can enable mac based authentication radius profiles and then finally we get into our various services so dynamic dns snmp universal plug and play ssh are we enabling ssh on this stuff this is interesting reboot schedule so check this out create new reboot schedule so we're going to call this reboot aps we're going to enable it and we're going to say every month on the first of the month at you know 12 p.m oh got to put a dash in there uh 12 am excuse me we're going to reboot uh these two devices so it's kind of just like a maintenance thing right if you just want your access points to power cycle once a month well you can just put them in this uh set up a reboot schedule for those devices pretty cool there's also poe schedules remember i told you i set up my business hours just a couple minutes ago let's say i had a whole bunch of voice over ip phones plugged into this device and maybe i wanted those voice over ip phones to shut off at night right maybe i don't need them on all night so if if normal business hours are 8 am to 6 pm well outside of those hours let's just turn off poe on the ports that control my voice over ip phones that way we're not wasting that extra electricity by having those phones on all night and then maybe you know half hour before people arrive in the morning we're going to fire those phones back up or re-enable poe on those ports so you can basically do that right here so we can say disable voip we can select our business hours that we set up previously and then i can choose you know ports say seven and eight right so this means that with this schedule created at eight am the poe is enabled and at six pm the poe is disabled so we're basically turning off all those phones outside of business hours which is really cool i have not yet seen a controller software that can do that so i think that's a really neat feature and then finally we can export all our data device lists client list rogue access point list etc etc we can export anything a lot of the stuff in omada out to a csv in case that is helpful to you in some way all right let's go down now to our controller settings so these are settings for the oc 200 hardware device or if you've got it in the cloud or if you have a self-installed version of the omada controller this is all of your settings time zone ntp servers are we enabling a mail server how long are we keeping our history let's now click on cloud access so for cloud access we can see that i have my cloud access connected and i have bound it to my tp-link id but if you did not want your devices you to be cloud controllable right so that you know there's certainly some security risk involved in that if you're connecting out to the cloud and the cloud gets compromised it is possible for your devices internally to get compromised through that cloud connection right so if you don't want that possibility you can simply disable cloud access for your controller and unlink your tp-link id and you're good to go all you have is local authentication credentials maintenance just shows us some information about the controller such as the controller version uh informate like user interface we want 24-hour time and then we can backup and restore if we want to reboot or factory reset or run upgrades or do a manual firmware update that's all done in here if we click on migration this is actually really nice there's two types of migration there's site migration so if we had you know 10 sites in our armada controller and we wanted to migrate just you know two of them over to a different controller we can do that with the site migration but they also have controller migration so if we want to migrate the entire controller say if we were upgrading from a oc 200 to an oc 300 or if we were going from a cloud controller to a hardware controller right we can migrate the entire controller through the wizards that they have in here and finally we have auto backup and when you plug a usb stick into the hardware controller you can turn on auto backup and then choose how often you're backing up to that external usb device okay i mean that's a lot that's a lot right there's a lot to go through with this software because it's a huge interface i mean you're controlling an entire network right so it's a lot to talk about hopefully i didn't brush through it too quickly for you guys but from what i can see tp-link omada is fully featured and mature like i'm pretty impressed with it um the hardware now now let's start talking about the hardware okay so i ran the wi-fi six access point against all of my crosstalk benchmark testing let's see how it did in my iperf testing here we can see the eap620 it came in fifth place behind the 4x4 u6lr and then all of these other access points basically it came in fifth place just behind the nano hd in the iperf testing in my open speed test testing uh it came in sixth place so just above the ubiquity uap ac pro and then in the sustained throughput test uh it came in fourth place now for the entire sort of crosstalk benchmark where did this thing actually place well we placed uh fifth so the eap620 is fifth place here you can see the u6lr which is still our reigning champion followed by this ingenious ews 850 ap the u6 light the nano hd and then finally we have the tp-link eap620 which is 2x2 multi-user mimo wi-fi six or in other words you can kind of think of this access point as on par with the uap ac pro and the nano hd right there it's sort of sandwiched in between those two access points for the price let's take a look at the bang for your buck metric uh the eap620 came in fourth right so bang for your buck u6 light u6lr then nano hd still ahead of the tp-link device based on performance for the price uh but then fourth place is this tp-link ea620 just edging out the uh uap ac pro and definitely beating both of the ingenious access points that i've tested so far we've seen the performance statistics we've seen the tp-link omada interface so let's get to the million-dollar question is tp-link omada a viable alternative to ubiquity and of course like anything the answer is complicated and it's also it depends on what metric you're comparing the two against right so let's look at a few different metrics all right we're going to look at price feature set performance security aesthetics as well as the support available for both of these products starting off with price tp-link blows ubiquity out of the water on price okay so here i have a spreadsheet of some comparable items for the router firewall we're using the tp-link er605 versus the most cost-effective firewall on the ubiquiti side which is the usg for the switch we have the eight port tp-link switch with two sfp ports the closest comparable switch on the ubiquiti side is the us8 150 watt the eap620 is a two by two wi-fi six axis point just like the u6 light then we have the wi-fi five eap 225 dash wall which is a 802.11 ac in-wall access point the closest one to that would be the uap in 795 dollars for ubiquity stuff a savings of a very comparable network from tp-link of 275 or in other words tp-link comes out to be about two-thirds the price of a comparable ubiquity setup but of course price isn't everything so let's talk next about feature set in my opinion this is a wash the feature set between tp-link omada versus unify are about the same so when you think about it most people are just going to have very vanilla needs i'm talking 90 plus percent of people both of these platforms are gonna have absolutely everything that you need that being said there are some things that tp-link has that ubiquity doesn't and there are some things that ubiquity unify has that tp-link doesn't so for those sort of outliers you know maybe there's a specific feature that you can only get in tp-link and that would prevent you from using unify at all or vice versa right so in terms of feature set it really comes down to what you need when you're installing but by and large these two products are very comparable in what they can actually do i will say however if you're comparing these on security i think ubiquity has the upper hand which is funny to say considering the breach that they recently had but the reason that i say ubiquity has the upper hand in terms of security is that you have to look at the fact that both ubiquity and tp-link offer local administration options as well as cloud hosted options tp-link makes the local administrative options a little bit easier whereas ubiquity likes to kind of hide the local administrative credentials you know they try to force everyone to the cloud but in the cloud ubiquity does have the option for two-factor authentication with time-based one-time passwords or totp codes tp-link does not have the option for two-factor authentication and i would say if tp-link is looking to make themselves a more viable competitor to ubiquity cloud-based 2fa is 100 mandatory local based 2fa so if you want to use local authentication credentials but also enable 2fa would be a really really nice feature to implement so for security ubiquity is going to edge out tp-link next onto performance so you guys saw the performance that i got in the benchmark testing that i did but the problem with my benchmark testing is that your mileage may vary right there's every wireless implementation every wireless install is going to be completely different right so the placement of the access points the quantity of the access points how the access points are configured in terms of output power or the channel that they're set to be on the channel with that they're set to as well as environmental factors such as the construction materials for the building or house that they're placed into these are all factors for performance right uh in my testing tp-link did not perform as well as a comparable ubiquity access point but i've also heard online that tp-link performed for some people a lot better than ubiquity performs i've also heard online that tp-link is garbage and doesn't perform anywhere near as well as ubiquity performs right so everyone has their own opinion i really can't gauge these on performance so in for the purposes of this video it's going to be a toss-up right i mean even if you took my performance stats as gospel and were like nope the tp link access point is x amount percentage uh lower performing than any comparable ubiquity equipment well even assuming that that would be the case it's debatable whether that difference in performance that i saw in my testing would even be noticeable to end users right so you'd have to like put this in place and have the ubiquity network running for a while in a production environment and then swap it out for the same tp-link stuff running in a production environment for a long time and if you were able to do that you'd get a good feel for that particular installation whether ubiquity was a better fit or tp-link was a better fit so as far as performance goes again i'm going to call it a wash because i you know i haven't tested these in production we have tested a bunch of ubiquity gear in production and i can say that ubiquity is a very well performing product whether tp-link would be able to stand up to the same performance that we've seen from ubiquity well that i just haven't tested nor am i able to test that because we don't use tp-link in production environments but if you have tp-link running in a production environment either for a business or for yourself at home and you have feedback about you know having tp link running versus having ubiquity running put that down in the comments below so that people can read that i would love to hear uh anyone's feedback on that particular subject all right aesthetics all right let's take a look at this this is tp-link's 2x2 wi-fi 6 access point all right this is ubiquiti's by two wi-fi six axis point right look at the difference in size between these two look at this look at it just the thinness of this one right so this is another big difference in that the ubiquiti products have the edge aesthetically because i think these are a lot sexier right they're they're just a sexier design they are not nearly as obtrusive as this one like if you had both of these on the wall at your business your restaurant or your know your home this one is a lot more inconspicuous than the tp link and you know this one just has one like light on the front whereas this has this fancy sort of blue ring that you can control the you know the brightness of and on some models you can even control the color of the blue ring so like just design wise aesthetically uh ubiquity has tp-link beat hands down so the question is then are the aesthetics worth the like 30 additional price tag uh and that would be that would be up to you finally let's talk about support options and again to me this is a wash right because i have not used tp tp-links technical support but by the way i've also barely ever used ubiquiti's technical support but anyone who's in the ubiquiti world will tell you that their support is pretty lacking like it's difficult to find it's difficult to get good ubiquity support through ubiquity and i imagine it's probably pretty similar with tp-link again that's my assumption because i haven't used them nor have i you know had a lot of experience with customers that have tried to use tp-link support so if you go to their support page for business products you've got a knowledge base you've got live chat support email support as well as phone support right on their page right so they make it pretty easy to get to their support but the experience of actually using their support i have not tried so i can't tell you how good it is they also have a tp-link community page but again you know ubiquity has a community page as well i'm not sure how active the tp-link community page is i know that ubiquiti's community community page is actually uh fairly active with a lot of people uh you know in there making comments and asking questions now here's the thing though with these products with these sort of pursuer prosumer type products you're not paying the annual license fee for good support right these are like one-time purchase products and it comes with support but yeah not really right you're kind of on your own for these types of products if you're a business that absolutely needs really good solid 24x7 365 support on a product then you're going to be going with cisco or aruba or ruckus or meraki you know one of these other vendors that provides that type of really good support and i can hear the comments already like oh he said meraki supports awesome but i know meraki support sucks i'm just throwing out names as an example right any of those companies that have annual licensing fees for their product typically those licensing fees are justified and come with a higher level of support services than you're going to get from these types of prosumer products that don't have annual license fees right and that's just the way of the world right that's just the way that business works if you're a business that relies upon these products and you need to have you know 100 percent uptime or as close to that as possible then it's worth it to you to pay the annual license fees for that support if for nothing else now of course where i disagree with that is when you stop paying the support license if the device stops working i don't like that model at all i mean if you should if you buy the device it should work for as long as that device is alive and if you're paying annual support fees it should be for things like you know software and firmware updates and or support services i don't like when you are paying if you don't pay your annual support the device itself stops working that's an absolutely ridiculous business model so as far as support goes in general again i'm going to call tp-link and ubiquity awash so really what it comes down to is i think ubiquity has tp-link beat on aesthetics and tp-link has ubiquity beat on price but other than that most of the other categories that i've mentioned are pretty similar between these two products feature set performance uh you know security i will say ubiquity does have the edge on security because they offer 2fa on their cloud uh anytime you're connected to their cloud so yeah your mileage may vary i'd love to hear your thoughts about this down below but uh if you guys have any of these tp-link modded devices in production i'd especially like to hear from you so put your feedback down in the comments so that other people can see that alright i hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did enjoy this video make sure you give me a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this make sure you click subscribe my name is chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 71,950

Rating: 4.9324808 out of 5

Keywords: tp-link Omada, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, tplink, eap225-wall, tplink omada, tplink vs ubiquiti, tplink vs unifi, omada vs unifi, unifi vs omada, unifi vs tplink, unifi vs tp-link, eap620, TL-SG105-M2, tl-r605, tl-sg2210mp, oc200, oc300, Omada

Id: 44gYQcHlCFk

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021