Unifi Express Review: Insights From Testing the New Network Controller, Firewall, and Mesh Unit

Tom here from Lauren systems and this is a UniFi Express which is a router and a Wi-Fi 6 device it also has UniFi OS and it also has a UniFi network controller and it's only using less than 10 watts and this whole device is only 149 I'm impressed with the overall packaging in price and as many of you who may have followed my channel before know I am critical of many of the UniFi routing devices for being a little bit lackluster but with this price tag of 149 and having all dimensioned featur features this is not that lackluster I think this is a good feature and price match now I bought this device myself cuz I really wanted to do some testing people were asking about it this was not sent to me anything by UniFi this was me purchasing it and then using it as my home router with my devices and my streaming and my Wi-Fi I did had to add one more Wi-Fi to cover all the devices in my house but that's actually a feature this has is being able to adopt other UniFi access points and switches let's dive into the review of this and we'll talk about what it can do and some of the shortcomings of what it can't really do so let's get [Music] started we're going to start here at the UniFi site and here as of recording late December 2023 yes it sold out I was lucky enough from the time it was first released to see it sold out then find a moment when it was in stock but now it's back to being sold out but I think that actually speaks to the good value proposition that this provides packing a lot into a small device at a reasonable price mov mov down here the built-in Wi-Fi 6 2x2 memo the 1500 ft single unit coverage they say single unit because well even up here mentions and we'll talk about some deployment options this can work by itself or with other units and it doesn't just have to work with other UniFi Express units this will actually mesh with other UniFi access points that you adopt to it the 60 plus Wi-Fi connected devices refers to how many Wi-Fi devices to connect to this device but once again if you you add more UniFi access points you can have more devices on here the 1 gig RJ45 Wan Port the 1 gig RJ45 landport so no 2 and 1/2 gig on this device but for this price point I think this is probably why they kept him only at 1 gig we do have the little LCM dis status display so that works quite well it's tiny but novel cuz it gives you some indication of what's going on with the system and then down here manages up to four additional UniFi network devices when operated as a Gateway I'm using this in gate we mode and I was able to adopt a couple other devices one switch and one access point but whatever combination of switch and access points you come up with five is the maximum so this really is targeted probably at the small home user or really even most home users I think just a couple access points depending on until you get to the really large houses will probably cover most people's needs now as far as what's in the box this is it you don't have anything else you get the device you get USBC power and a RJ45 network cable now I've tested this and it has a max of 10 watts that it says it pulls and it generally stayed below that 10 watts even in some of the load testing I was doing at speed now they do have their technical specs page which does cover just how small this device is so 98x 98x 30 mm or 3.6x 3.6x 1.2 in so yes it's really tiny fits on a shelf fits really anywhere small networking closet and I thought the heat was reasonable on it it does get a little warm but not too warm the max 10 watt power cons is noted here the one thing that is missing though is the processor in there so I SS HED in looked at the CPU it's just a qualcom processor in this nothing too fancy initial setup of the device was really simple and one thing I really like even though it asks you to sign into UI they did not make it hard to find at all the proceed without an account button so no this does not need to be tied to a cloud in order to set it up that makes me really happy now once in the device itself you can go to the UniFi OS settings we we see that the network is up to date we see I'm on the official release Channel and by default but of course changeable the auto update is turned on both for UniFi OS and the applications I think by default on is the best way to set these because too many people never update things and causes a lot of security problems so by default it will do this but for those of us who are more advanced and want to choose when we update or choose even the non-official maybe we want the release candidate early access options we have those Advanced options available to us of note unlike the larger options such as the dream machine pro you'll notice that the only thing in here is is the network controller this does not have support for the other UniFi features right now such as talk or the UniFi NVR and a few other options they have I don't think there'll be a feature where it has more of those options just due to the limitations of processor on this and just how small of a device it is now before we get into the dashboard I do want to talk about deployment options because they made this a little a little bit unique they have the ability to mesh these to other UniFi Express devices so you can get a standalone one and use it as your network router at your home or you can mesh it to other UniFi expresses this has the add of advantage of when you mesh these together of having not only another Wi-Fi access point but also using the wired option now I only have one so I did not test this to confirm that this works but it's supposed to work where a mesh and then you can also attach a wired device on the other end of the other one so if you have a computer upstairs that you like to have hardwired you don't have a direct path to get the wiring in there you'd be able to tie one of the UniFi expresses to another UniFi Express and then also have that hard wire access point up at the top but of course you're still going to have the latency problems that come with Wi-Fi meshing Now something else worth noting is you can mesh it with more than just another UniFi Express you can adopt up to four other access points or up to a switch and three more access points or three switches and one more access point because there's only a four device limit on this but it will mesh with the other access points that you adopt I think that's actually a really nice feature that I have it adopted to a UniFi aclr and then I can put it in mesh and this is a pretty ideal situation because a lot of people may not want to buy another UniFi Express when some of the other devices are a little bit cheaper and will also do the same thing and I think this could be really good for people who want that extra connectivity in other areas of house where they can't get direct wiring to and although direct wiring is always going to be better and more performant because you are using some of the Wi-Fi to get to the other device which causes more latency because you've got more hops in the mix it does work and will get connectivity to those other areas now once you log into the UniFi dashboard it looks much the same as any other UniFi dashboard this is version 8024 which is current as of December of 2023 we have our traffic identification Wi-Fi technology most active clients even shows that the UniFi Express is is meshed to a UAP aclr that's why I used for my testing when I was testing this for being my home router now we have the topology Maps which work the same as they do in any UniFi then we have all the client device options so you can see all the devices click on any of these devices and get more details about them the port manager works much the same and does support vlans with the radio tuning option it does allow you to control the UniFi Express as well as the other adopted access points this device does support traffic identification and of course traffic filtering you can do this on a client level or you can do this on a global level now the system does have VPN support including the teleport VPN the magic sight to site the VPN server supported and we can create a new one to show you we have wire guard openvpn and l2tp I tested wire guard to figure out just how fast would go and it's just a little bit over 80 megabits a second so not bad for this type of processor on here as I mentioned it's not particularly fast but at least you have an idea of just how fast you can route through this with a wire guard VPN now if you want to use this as a VPN client to tie to another device you do have wire guard and openvpn and then if you want to use it for Sight to site you have only IPC and openvpn these are not limitations of this device this is just the current status of the UniFi network controller and their gateways now when you come over here to security this is where there's a difference between this and the UniFi dream machine pro and some of the more expensive UniFi controllers is even though we have device identification traffic identification the ability to do country restrictions and ad blocking that's it the other security section that actually does like the threat monitoring and the Honeypot option are both missing from this device and I don't think they're going to put them in I believe once again limitations of this smaller device and the performance of the processor but even with traffic identification I had no problems getting gigabit routing to work now when using this device as my home router with all my streaming devices and chomecast and people coming over and jumping on the guest Wi-Fi all that worked great no problems at all where there are a few limitations though is that slower speed for VPN so if you're trying to use this for a policy routing VPN and you were really hoping for really good speeds you're going to have to look elsewhere that's a limitation on this I think this device is good for recommending it to the average home user that doesn't have a real need for anything other than connectivity it works great for basic connectivity it works great as an auto update device because many of us have worked in the tech field and had that friend ask what's that device I can set that I don't want to pay you to manage that I hope automatically updates itself and stays secure I think this is a good fit for that as there are a lot of the other UniFi dream machine series because a lot of them have these same features with the auto update and a little bit better speeds but for 149 this feels like a really solid home user choice and maybe for many of you it is a good choice but if you want those more advanced features this is where the UniFi router kind of has some limitations an easy example is going to be if you want to do a more custom policy routing config with wire guard that's where these fall short and it's not just this device this is still my complaints about the way UniFi handles routing in general they don't give you a lot of advanced features such as with openvpn and someone's going to point out that yes you can go and SSH into them and start customizing them to get those more advanced features but that can actually be the challenge because those settings may not persist through updates may break so if you don't need any of those extra Advanced features this is a solid device if you need those Advanced features well that's where I may recommend a more advanced firewall but for the package the price and for something that I would recommend to many of my less technical friends to use for routing at their house and Wi-Fi at their house maybe with a couple extra access points this thing I think for 149 is a killer deal the meshing feature being able to mesh with other devices is really cool now one other note about their other deployment is the ability to and I'll test this in a future video cuz I don't completely understand the use case adapt it to another UniFi dream machine that seems kind of odd to me to want to do that I'll don't completely understand because it seems more practical to adopt these because they work as access points when you adopt them to Dream Machines they also as of the current firmware do not seem to have the ability to adopt to a self-hosted controller so if you wanted to deploy these maybe in a business setting and manage them from your controller that's not an option where you would deploy these to let's say a bunch of clients now you can tie them to the UniFi Cloud so you can access them that way that's nice and gives you some monitoring options but yeah it's kind of strange that they have this ability to adopt to the UniFi controller but only if it's in a dream machine and I'll test that in a different video because I have to first take it out of being my home router and then I'll adopt it to the dream machine and see if they play nice together doing that but hey overall it's pretty cool adopting it to a few other access points that you have that makes a lot more sense but let me know what your use case is or why you want to adopt it to a dream machine and why you think that should be a feature leave those thoughts in the comments down below like And subscribe to see more content from this Channel and I'll see you over in the forums [Music] thanks [Music]

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 163,311

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, unifi express, unifi network, unifi controller, unifi controller setup, unifi express review, unifi express router, unifi express vs dream router, unifi express travel router, ubiquiti unifi, unifi network controller, unifi network setup 2023

Id: fLLa9WGWPCQ

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2023