I'm happy to see Ubiquiti getting some exposure here and on Reddit and other places recently (and also a bit worried that this means they're about to start releasing garbage and/or get bought by Cisco, since that seems to be a phenomenon that happens).
We've been installing and using their gear in deployments all over the place for over 5 years now and it always just works. I think we've had to replace two faulty units in that time, out of, I dunno, several dozens.
Their software is getting better and better too, and their security camera system is IMO way ahead of most of the competition in the same price range (with the exception of a network disconnection issue that has had us and Ubiquiti tech support tearing our hair out for weeks now).
I hate that their management software requires Java though, it can be fiddly and annoying to install and I think one of our techs finally set up a VM specifically for their management software.
The Java stuff caused problems at our office because the installer (on OS X) didn't even run. Not on any computer. It got stuck trying to discover the device, when in fact it was the Java app that didn't work properly. We had start that web server thing from the shell and then point a browser to it. Even then we (one of whom is a former Cisco engineer) had to struggle several hours just getting it to start a working wifi network.
The box is Apple-pretty, but it's probably the least smooth network device I've had the misfortune to set up, and it's scared me off Ubiquity a bit. It's not just us, either. Forums found plenty of people with similar issues, but no solutions.
As someone who's had to deal with Cisco WLCs/APs, I can't imagine anything more complicated and frustrating to set up and use. Can't download or upload configuration backups without a TFTP or FTP server, the interface is a mess to try to navigate, there's a lot of Cisco-specific terminology that isn't explained so you end up spending a lot of time googling terms to find out that they're things you knew about already.
Then there's running the things. Switching to 40Hz channels screwed up our wireless network until I discovered that iOS devices have problems with bonded channels with upper control. An easy fix usually, but the WLC doesn't give you the option to prefer one or the other; it just randomly picks a channel and then pairs it with the associated channel however. Now I have a dozen APs and I have to manually assign the channels on each one because if I set it to auto it chooses an upper channel 50% of the time.
I had an issue for a while where the APs weren't passing broadcast traffic on my LAN. After a long search, I found tons of documentation on enabling multicast (didn't help), Bonjour caching (wasn't relevant), and so on. What actually fixed it was enabling HREAP on my WLAN, for some reason.
Cisco stuff is probably great if you're spending tens of thousands of dollars and you're a Cisco-certified engineer, or if you're the kind of person to plug everything in and not change any checkboxes you don't have to, but for managing it in an office it's been a frustrating disaster.
I went in blind and set everything up within 30 min easily running the Unifi controller that needs a properly setup Java runtime environment on OS X El Capitan. I'm going to put the controller on a Raspberry Pi soon as well to move infrastructure software off my work environments. It's kind of cludgey to setup Java still in 2016 but if that wasn't your issue I'm not sure how you expected to install everything. It seemed fairly clear from the quick install guide that you need the controller daemon / web server running first and that it will discover the AP you need to provision.
I'll take an awkward, consistent Java runtime setup over random solutions for, say, Python web servers using all sorts of configs.
I think the OS X thing is just offered to be nice, but their controller is effortless to install on Debian, even remotely.
I put our controller on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet with Debian 8. Took 10 minutes to set up back in January, has been working faultlessly ever since (even through automated updates).
Yes, but the problem with Dockerizing the Ubiquiti controllers (or at least the Unifi one - I haven't attempted with the others) is that the Java app requires MongoDB, and chooses to spin it up as a child process and treat it as an embedded database. Unless you're careful with volume mounting, restarting the Docker container will lose all your wireless connection info, forcing you to reset the AP to defaults or restore the Mongo instance from a backup.
This is generically true of all docker containers that need to persist storage. The docker hub page is pretty explicit about which volumes are exposed and therefore probably contain persistent data.
> I hate that their management software requires Java though
Yeah, it stinks. But their wi-fi access points have been sooo reliable for us that it is worth the pain. We had random problems with a few other brands' most expensive routers - cost does not equal quality.
As a mitigation, we only run the management software once every many months to make changes to configuration (it is not left running on a server). We lose some logging and things, but everything works fine.
We've been installing and using their gear in deployments all over the place for over 5 years now and it always just works. I think we've had to replace two faulty units in that time, out of, I dunno, several dozens.
Their software is getting better and better too, and their security camera system is IMO way ahead of most of the competition in the same price range (with the exception of a network disconnection issue that has had us and Ubiquiti tech support tearing our hair out for weeks now).
I hate that their management software requires Java though, it can be fiddly and annoying to install and I think one of our techs finally set up a VM specifically for their management software.