Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine

I got tired of the performance and inconsistency of my 'high end' residential setup and recently bought/installed a DreamMachine. Already had a Unifi nanoHD AP, and added one more to the opposite side of the house. This setup has been running for a couple months, but so far has been the most consistent and reliable setup we've had. Good management and security tools, decent UI/UX for the controller. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, and wish I went with this (or similar) setup a long time ago. It costs more than what a residential setup costs, but not more than the 3 or 4 setups I've tried over the last 4 years. If you can swing the higher entry price, I feel that it's worth it. It's simply a superior experience in every way for us (meaning: there is no experience for the household - things work and I don't have to fuss with it unless I want to).

Same for me, buying my dream machine pro (and AP's) was one of my few tech purchases that I have zero regrets buying. It is still running strong after a few years and see no reason to change it anytime soon. Have they been perfect? No, but this has allowed me to control my network how I actually want to control it. This has lead me to now having multiple Ubiquiti components (with more planned), my most recent was switching away from Synology to the UNAS Pro and it has been great. Really the only thing I ever bought from them that I really regretted was the tooless mini rack. Was really cool but I have non ubiquiti things that I need to mount and I doubt they are going to actually make a server I can run k8s anytime soon.

I’d highly recommend a Ubiquity Dream Machine Pro if you have any advanced use cases. I’ve got mine VPN bridged to my office router and it’s been convenient to be able to force some devices at home to have all traffic routed over that link. PlayStation dev kits annoyingly require usage on a whitelisted static IP to activate (every 2 days) and access dev PSN environments. It would have been a huge PITA doing it any other way.

I'm happy enough with my Unifi Dream Machine, a couple access points and a single switch. I can't tell if Unifi is attempting to focus on business to the exclusion of technically inclined home users? I wish there was a wifi system with open-source firmware and fully wireless access points for the places I can't easily run ethernet but I don't know of any.

You can turn off the remote login. It's encouraged as the default, but not necessary. Even the local login, from a device on the network, can be set up to require two-factor auth. That alone makes it more secure than a lot of consumer-grade stuff which only requires a password, which is often never changed from the default. I'm happy with my Unifi Dream Machine as a one-device home network. I thought about getting rid of it a while back when some bad press about Unifi security was published, but it turns out it was fake news and Brian Krebs has lost all credibility in my eyes for continuing to promote it even after it was debunked.