This week I moved the networking in our condo from ASUS AiMesh to Ubiquiti UniFi, and UniFi is a lot better. Some observations:

• UniFi is no more expensive than high-end ASUS gear. I had a ASUS RT-AX88U, ASUS RT-AXE7800, ASUS RT-BE88U and a ASUS RP-AX58. Except for the RP-AX58 those cost between $200-300. I got the top-of-the-line UniFi Dream Router 7 for $279. The UniFi U7 Lite AP is $99 which is perfectly reasonable.
• The UniFi software is much better. I’ve used ASUS routers for a decade and I quite like the ASUS software and how it grew out of the open source Tomate Project. But it’s also clear that it’s evolved through a process of accretion rather than design, with confusing and overlapping menus. And it has a system reboot scheduler feature that I had to use, or the networking get become stuck after running for a few days. The UniFi software is much more intuitive and well designed.
• The UniFi WiFi hardware is better even though it doesn’t have the huge footprint and imposing antennas of the ASUS gear. I needed one ASUS router and 2 hardwired APs to cover out 2000 sqft condo, with a 4th AP in the garage. This gave great WiFi coverage, but the Dream Router 7 seems able cover the condo by itself. I’m getting an additional UniFi AP for the garage.

For context, we live in a rambling 2000 sqft victorian condo in a dense neighborhood in San Francisco with lots of other WiFi transmitters close by. The walls are lath-and-plaster (although not with wire mesh) and they soak up WiFi. A previous owner pulled CAT-6 ethernet between some rooms and I’ve extended that. I’ve only ever used ASUS AiMesh with wired backhaul.

For work reasons we really need our internet to be up and we have dual-WAN configured redundant connections.

I bought my first ASUS RT-AC56U router way back in 2015. It was fast, and I used the built-in USB-drive-based NAS features to good effect. ASUS eventually dropped support for it and I got the RT-AX88U in 2019. Then I would get a new ASUS router every couple of years as a I got annoyed with bad WiFi coverage in a particular part of the condo, and used the old routers as AiMesh APs.

The only thing I’m missing with the UniFi gear is that the APs don’t have SFP+ ports for backhaul. But that’s because they generally rely on PoE for power, and that doesn’t work with SFP+. Overall I think that’s a good tradeoff.