 Tom here from Orange Systems, and we're going to talk about TP-Link Omada and Unify software-defined networking So TP-Link is a newer competitor in the software-defined networking market with their Omada It's actually been around for a little while, but it hasn't been as popular as Unify But their latest 4.0 version they really ramped it up and made a system that looks Dramatically like Unify and of course they're being opportunistic. There's been a few missteps in the Unify Ecosystem I guess you could say that has angered some of the fan base angered some of their customers and said hey Let's look at alternatives and I went ahead and checked out the TP-Link And I did a full review of the system when we initially got it did some testing with it And now a few weeks later of using it at my house I'd say it's been very reliable for a home networking setup with the exception of the firewall their firewalls as bad as Unify we'll get into the details in a second But I wanted to do a comparison of these two products and kind of lay them outside by side Now before we dive into all the details if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to laurencesystems.com If you'd like to hire a sharp project There's a hires button up at the top if you would like to just reach out and contact me hit me up on Twitter Or head over to our forums great way to engage now Let's first talk about software-defined networking and the way the two products line up first We're gonna look at the Unify product line and they offer a large series of switches and Wi-Fi access points So there's quite a bit that's been around for a while in a unified platform that you all merges into it and most everything that says Unify on it versus ubiquity the company name is part of their system that works with their software to find networking And it's not too hard to find these devices They were available on Amazon and Unify's really been pushing for a direct sales model as of late Then you have the Unify controller options, which is the Unify dream machine or a dream machine Pro these are the integrated firewall and Controller software and one device and then they have some of the recommended things on here And of course, they also have their cloud key, which is a hardware device to be able to Manage the software to find networking on now the Omana has something very similar So if we go over to the Omana we have a much more limited as of right now list of devices and we have the AP 660 620 265 and that's really it these top ones right here for a few Indoor models and then we have one outdoor model the AC 1200 then we have just a couple different switches So as of right now here in April of 2021 There are not a lot of options But these are all the devices that are compatible on there and like so I did a full review And I break these down in my other video and they have two different firewall options and yeah Like I said, they copied Unify to the point of making not so great firewalls So let's actually dive into some of the features though that both of these have that are alike now You can on both of these platforms Download the software to find network controller and host it yourself without any registration Now where the difference is and this is where TP link really took advantage if you get the OC 200 OC 300 which is the cloud controller the hardware device from TP link that will host their software find networking You do not have to Register with the TP link at all with their cloud registration with Unify They made some changes here in 2021 that angered much of the community as I alluded to and specifically around forced registration this is now part of the Dream Machine series the the cloud keys and it's just not something I think is Necessary I like it as an option if you want to use their cloud to be able to remotely manage this But I don't think it should be necessary But you know if I made that decision and so this will you know split the market a little bit on that particular topic But both Unify and TP link still offer their self-hosted version without forced registration So I just want to make sure that part's clear because that does come up They go well are they gonna change it on the self-hosted version if you you know roll your own server Doesn't look like it I don't think they would because they have a lot of people that are in my category Which is the IT and Managers writer space that are using these now both of these allow for the hosting of Clients controllers in our stack So we have a server that we host all the Unify systems on we have all the clients in a list Unify makes us really really easy to do with their controller And of course there's companies such as hostify that Riley Chase put together that offers hosting of the controller software So I think that market they don't want to disrupt They don't mind disrupting the end user market with Unify But the other bigger markets that are the MSP market and you know We've installed a lot of these at scale and have a lot of these systems that we manage I don't think they're gonna make changes to that But hey, this is one of the reasons we keep an eye on new products now Amada does have a similar system where you can do that type of hosting I couldn't find anyone that really I know that's tested at a scale I seen some comments from people when I did the TP link review video But I couldn't reach out to any of the other MSPs I know that we're talking about large-scale installs But a lot of people seem to happy with it in my experience of testing it at my houses It held up really well now a couple things that these guys offer that's really cool is simple wireless management These are some of the reasons these platforms are so popular now for example on the Unify side This is what the wireless management looks like we can define different wireless networks And this propagates to all the devices adopted switch over here to the Omada side pretty much the same thing here The Omada I wish all for the dark mode I left it on dark mode to easily distinguish between ubiquity and Omada But other than that offering dark mode when you start going through these settings You realize they look very very similar now Let's look at the VLANs here at the Omada and you see I have one VLAN to find at my home that it was set up for Testing VLAN 1 2 3 shows the ID We have the LAN that main interface that I have set up on my house using the Omada and pretty simple When you define this all the devices that are adopted network Get this VLAN information so you can apply it and apply it to each port over here to the Unify This is our office network. We have more VLANs to find but essentially we have a extremely similar Menuing system and it makes it really easy. So if I want to apply VLAN tag 50, we'll go over here to a device So just hit device and We'll choose a switch and then this edit a port on the switch And we can simply choose any of those to find VLANs That are in that list now, let's look at how that works over at the Omada. We look at the switch we go to ports And we'll use a port not news hit edit and There's our easy one two three VLAN Really similar the way both of them work side by side So a lot of the decision becomes a little bit difficult because TP-Linked is such a good copy job I would say because Unify had this was popularized this kind of easy pull-down method that makes defining a VLAN easy that makes it So you don't have to go and Message each switch and make sure the configurations are tied together as you adopt them into the network They all just follow suit and have this option applied to every switch in your network And I think this is a really great system It does make for easy management and of course this makes for remote management So you can have the controller at a separate location from the actual site where these are being managed in our case Many of our clients like this So if we needed to look at a port see if it's active see what the stats are on that port both of these softwares Offer that same solution now This is where there is a big variation though in how they adopt things onto the network And it's unusual that for all the copying that TP-Linked did they didn't copy this feature So right here. I've got a device plugged in to the TP-Link and it's on the same Land as the TP-Link, so I have it on the 172 network. This is actually on the 172 network as well So it sees it and ready for adoption So all I have to do is go here and hit adopt and it'll adopt this into the network and become Part of all the other devices on here now in unify the way that works and we'll go over here to settings And we'll go to controller and Unify you would set this right here So it says omata.laurencesystem.com. No, this is in public publicly accessible We set this up internally as a demo But when we move it over to different networks that have access to it It doesn't push the controller host name IP name This is a variation from the way that it's done with Unify with Unify You set your controller and host name and then when you adopt devices and for example when we adopt them here in our Local controller, then we send them out in the field to a client They're phoning home to the proper entry the TP-Link chose not to do that So even though they have a spot to define it that isn't where you actually set it You actually have to log into each device such as a firewall or switch and Adopt them by putting in where the controller is tell it to adopt now before you do that You have to log into these because each one of the TP-Link devices can be a standalone or can work with the controller software This is also a variation from Unify which Unify if you buy one of their Wi-Fi access points or their firewalls It only allows for adoption and switches into their system to work It doesn't have a standalone web interface But because they do have a web interface you roughly got to set it up Just got to log in and create a username and password Then you go over and go to the controller section in these and push the settings into the controller that tell it where the omata controller is and That's how you can adopt them when they're not on the same network when they're on the same network They can discover each other But this is a little bit more tedious because I can set up 20 unifies plug them all in the same network Hit adopt on all 20 of them and send them out in the field whether they're firewalls whether their Unify access points or unify switches mostly we don't use the firewalls more on that in a moment But that is a easy way to do it Omata has kind of an easy way of going into each device or you can use the omata discovery tool Which only adopts their Wi-Fi units and point them so you could set it up I found that software kind of buggy because it only works with Oracle Java But I did test it and you can do it that way and it does have a bulk option So it's it's okay. It does that now related to that is figuring out all the ports that it used I found the documentation absolutely lacking on TP-Link, but being it's a newer product and not as mature as the unified platform I think that's just gonna happen There's also the confusion because if you go backwards to their version 3 versus their version 4 software There's some wild differences in the way it works Unify has Incrementally changed their system and of course now they have some of the newer interface that they're working at but overall There's a pretty longer path that they've had so there's a lot more documentation For the Unify available on their website and a lot more details because well the products place it better round a lot longer Now let's get to the firewall. This is where TP-Link shouldn't have copied at all I don't get it. They copied the firewall and they copied the problems that come with firewalls from ubiquity and The the problems are just mind-numbing to me in 2021 why you would do this for example Let's set up a block of IPs on a WAN address. Yeah, they decided to copy that same flaw from Unify. We either Unify for years has had requests and someone will probably point out in the comments that it's in beta right now A beta feature to allow you to have a block of IPs assigned to the WAN I can't believe it's a beta feature on a company that claims to be enterprise or even business oriented at all because for home users Yeah, you're probably only gonna have one IP on the WAN, but for any of the business users This starts becoming a problem when you have it, you know, just you want two or three IP addresses Well, there's ways to do it, but there's not any official ways to assign them But they do allow you a little bit different in TP-Link versus Unify to build multiple WAN ports on there now they do support failover, so I'll give them that but the failover is Buggy to say the least I haven't done much failover testing with TP-Link, but I'm gonna go with it's still not great It's not granular. It gives you very few options It's kind of a you get what you get and there's very little control over it The basicness that are firewalls is also related to VPNs They just don't give you much in a way of VPNs or policy routing So if you wanted to do Site-to-site VPNs are kind of neat, but that's it if you have two sites both running the Unify or both running TP-Link Which I haven't tested but TP-Link claims to support this But when you have them together, what you end up with is the ability to say hey Take this site and this site and have them talk to each other. It's actually a really neat feature. I think Unify has But it's a neat feature It's not the killer app feature and more people want better, you know, remote user VPN support and better support overall For remote user VPN. There's some variations between them But both of them I wouldn't recommend to anyone that needs solid VPN support Something like a pfSense is going to handle that better something like untangle is going to handle that better So neither one of these companies I really think is good for the firewall And by the way for me taking these home and doing my testing which that's why those other devices I don't have here such as the aesthetically not pleasing large EAP 620 hd That I'm not sure why they made it so big I have that at my house right now But I do not have the firewall there because I just couldn't bring myself to use this firewall at my house with the lack of features I need some of the VPN support to be able to get back into my house And uh those shortcomings mean to me whether it's unified or TP-Link I wouldn't use either firewall But some final decisions here for those of you wanting to know now because I just don't have the track record with TP-Link I don't know that I'd recommend this for a large-scale business install Maybe we'll try one out in some of the smaller businesses that are looking just for some basic access and see how it goes I'm going to keep running this in my house so I can keep gathering data Because the experiments at my house of swapping everything and knowing that my house even noticing went well The range is good. I had no problem with the roaming between devices So it worked as good as the unified stuff that I was using at my house prior to moving it over to TP-Link So for home users, I don't see any problem recommending this like this is stuff I would definitely recommend for a home user even the firewalls I think for a home user who just says I just need internet access and you know The kids want to be able to be online. I think TP-Link solid for that I've said the same about unify if you just want to get online You don't care much about some of those other features like home user stuff. Great now the homelab people You're probably going to want a better firewall. You're the home lab and business, of course Is going to be more interested in you know, let's say whole home VPNs or policy routing Or some of the more advanced things that you want to mess with in your home lab The firewall is going to leave you disappointed from both of these companies But the wireless access and the switches I think are pretty reasonable Especially if you're on a budget for the homelab stuff The overall doesn't feel quite as polished on the TP-Link and the offerings are a little bit Narrow where they don't have as many 10 gig options But the budget oriented nature of it. Um, and so far from what other people have told me overall They've been reliable and I think that's good I just don't know anyone who's installed them at massive scale to see if there's problems or bugs in it But a lot of the homelab people that did talk to that I know have gone Yeah, I've had one for a while. It actually works pretty good So I think that's a good recommendation over on the homelab side The other advantage that is going to be with TP-Link is the fact that you can get some deals on amazon you can get fast shipping and Unify with them moving everything towards direct sales and away from amazon I feel as the prices went up a little bit more than it used to be So this can kind of be challenging and unifies not being favorable to resellers anymore like they were As a matter of fact, there's not a ton of resellers of the Unify equipment because if you are a large scale reseller of it You know the margins are like really small on the devices Unify is not much for discounts But my overall on Unify, I mean having deployed it at scale having put a lot of these out there We've found their wireless access points to be very very reliable We found their switches to be very reliable over time That we've got these installs and this goes back years I mean, we've finally replaced a couple of them from a client We installed back in 2013 The only reason we upgraded is because they did some building upgrades and wanted to get off the old 2.4 stuff We installed in 2013 Nothing wrong with the devices other than a couple LEDs were really dim or burned out That was actually a known issue in some of the earlier models They would keep working with the led ring on those would be You know, not too bright or even not working at all, but the device itself worked perfectly fine So those are my thoughts on this I'll leave a link to the videos I've done on Unify I have a whole playlist for that and I'll leave a link to the TP link omata that I did the review on and some of the hardware on there But my overall thoughts on it. Like I said, it seems pretty good hardware I'm both sides on there, but firewalls. Sorry. I'm gonna have to drop both of them on there So hopefully this helps if you're looking at building out Some of your gear and your home lab are thinking about it for business And if you're someone who has and want to talk a little bit more in depth that from a business standpoint have Use the multi controller at scale Then that'd be great to talk to and also security if anyone can give me some issues with TP link or Understand them better because There's still some questions. I have like having telnet enabled and things like that I don't find any flaws in it, but they also don't have a bug bounty program So any of the security people I've reached out to so far since I my initial review Have no interest in really looking at it because they look at it is, you know Not a lot of value in it because it's kind of a home user thing So they're not really looking to attack it. There's no bug bounty program as opposed to ubiquity They do have a bug bounty program. So I've known some of them who have taken some real You know hard looks at it and I've talked about before some of the flaws in the adoption that were discovered from unify But it it's not arbitrary. There's actually some security built into unify And it's been vetted way more than TP link Really not as clear on this, but I also don't see them incentivizing security reachers to poke up their stuff So if you are a security issue has poked at it or interested in it If I can give you remote access or you know, help you out and that contact me hit me up on twitter Let me know. All right. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of this video If you enjoyed this content, please give it a thumbs up If you like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon To hire a share project head over to laurancesystems.com and click on the hirest button right at the top To help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links and descriptions of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly So check back frequently And finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, check out some of our other videos