[WorldMaker]

Ubiquiti has a consumer/prosumer brand called Amplifi now. It's got the ease of something like Eero but the decade of experience of Unifi. (They also already have a WiFi 6 mesh router at the top of the line on the prosumer side.)

[hedora]

I recommended an Amplifi to some friends that aren’t computer-savvy, and didn’t hear back. (Their previous router was crashing frequently.)

I visited them a few months later and noticed it, so I asked about it.

They had kind of forgotten about it. There were zero problems setting it up and zero problems since. They said they thought it was kind of pricey.

If I remember right, it was $50 more than the cheapest (but terrible) one with similar specs. It was $100 less than an expensive, terrible and comparable one.

I can’t imagine a more favorable review of consumer networking gear. :-)

Also, I have had zero issues with the Ubiquiti access point I use at home. I have a pcengines apu2 OpenBSD router, so I can’t say much about their routers.

[WorldMaker]

Very similarly, I recommended Amplifi to my parents. They've had a couple issues with it, but that's due to a complicated bit of their new house more than Amplifi itself.

The house they just moved into had a strange audio LAN wired through the house when it was built. The audio LAN had a couple CAT-5E ports for "expansion" (presumably?) on each floor just about perfectly located for WiFi AP backhaul. So I worked with my parents on a plan to try three of Amplifi's routers rather than one AP and two "Satellites".

This seemed to work alright. The Amplifi phone app wasn't great about setting up a multi-AP mesh of that sort just yet (as opposed to the focused use case of one router/AP and several "satellites") and didn't always have the best experience (in navigation/details), but other than UX complaints, the system just works as expected.

However, my parents then discovered that there were "hidden" components also wired to the Audio LAN somewhere between the primary Audio LAN router and the "expansion ports", which meant that some of the system's speakers stopped operating. (It would have been great to have a wiring diagram of the whole LAN. We did a lot of trial and error discovery on this.)

So my parents decided to "turn off" the backhaul by reconnecting it to the Audio LAN. There was angsty confusion that they "broke" the WiFi because they ignored/forgot my explicit instructions to disconnect the router's WAN cables on the house ports that were now again Audio LAN ports. As I had expected, once disconnected from the confusing (to people and devices alike) Audio LAN, the Amplifi Routers straightened themselves out and switched to a more traditional bridged mode ("wireless backhaul") as if they were mere "satellites".

According to the math I did, my parents paid a lot less for that experiment with all Amplifi routers than if they'd tried it with "full" routers of any of the other brands we'd comparison shopped (and none of them seemed to offer an ala carte buying experience similar to Amplifi's section of Amazon), though obviously more than if they'd bought only one router and two satellites of any of the other brands in the first place. The extra LAN port on the Amplifi router is still critical to them on one of the floors (a home office VOIP system that "requires" a wired connection) and they couldn't easily swap at least one of the routers for a Satellite anyway.

Other than the crazy backhaul experiment confusion, my parents haven't had any problems. I don't think we could have ran that experiment with any of the other brands. My parents seem happy with the purchase and the quality of their WiFi on all three floors, which was the important thing for them, and I get the feeling they were happy with the price despite "over-paying" a tad due to the experiment.