UniFi Protect: From Underdog to Industry Leader

Love it what a great solution. Thank you for your time and sharing knowledge with us little people:) you are truly an asset and someone that people look for your how to videos in all types of subject. Again thank you God bless and happy new years!

We installed 56 AVYCON cameras a couple years ago, but also had a Unifi Protect NVR with a few cameras for the indoor areas (Mainly server room and some secure spaces). I have been replacing the avycons with G5 turrets and installed an Enterprise NVR a few months ago, mainly because the Avycons just don't work well with the Unifi, they work but tend to be laggy during playback.
Also really like the AI features in the Unifi cameras and think the 2k Unifi cameras are a better image than the 4k Avycons.
One of my favorite features is the timeline playback, and how you cn swap cameras and the timeline keeps going. With the avycon DVR I had to pick each cameras and choose where in the timeline I wanted to view, it was near impossible to get them synced up. With Unifi it is a breeze to trace events across multiple cameras, and downloading the footage is so simple.
We've just added 10 doors with the Access system as well, which I run through the Enterprise NVR, and are eliminating people having physical door keys, and it's been great.

I was going to build a Synology NVR for my 5 HIKVISION cameras. but now I am going to try it out on my CloudKey Gen2+ and see what happens.

I just upgraded all my home gear to unifi. Man.... it's so nice. The software is so good :chefskiss:

We really need ubiqui protect to auto backup to a network share then i’d buy. What if someone walks off / taken a hammer with my NVR’s hard drive is a concern.

Well Protect still missing Important features like automatically Backup from footage. When someone stole the HDDs from the UNVR the footage are lost. HA is still missing, you can stake the UNVR and UNVR Pro but That is not 100% mature, sometime it doesn't work correctlly. Disaster Recovery is also missing.

Glad to see it improving. I'm still happy with Synology, but competition is good for everyone

I have been looking into Unifi Protect. I am hesitant due to the following:
* No reasonably-priced 6MP or 8MP cameras
* No obvious support for H.265+ (I think they use a custom H.264+ = old codec)
* With third-party cameras, I do not think you even get Motion-Detect (only record)
* Do not have a wide variety of camera types (limited choices)

I would like to know... about how much space does a Unify 8MP camera use recording 24/7 for a week?

There is nothing industry leading about ubiquity. If a business is in any type of regulated industry they are prohibited and coming soon with new PCI rules you will not be compliant to take credit cards if these are in use on your network or in ones facilities

Protect Is Great, the only missing feature is the ability to receive notifications from the doorbell to unify talk devices. Also watching protect cameras over a VPN connection to UDM-Pro when remote access is disabled is not possible which is a real bummer.

I just deployed a 39 camera system of mostly G5 Turrets at a site and i'm very happy with them, the night vision is really powerful and the detections work great, very versatile.

If you know what you're doing and like open source stuff, Frigate is way better than Unifi Protect and it's free and extremely well supported.

Unifi is the king

My father runs the IT at a small hospital and he really wants to use Unifi Protect but it is not in the budget to replace all the cameras. Even with the AI port the amount needed although would probably half the cost is still too much. They have over a hundred cameras a mix of 2k, 4k, and HD. All support ONVIF but unfortunalty the current version of Protect does not support receiving detections from the camera. Only the video feed and audio.

So they have AI Port. But what if I have third party AI Camera Amcrest AI 4K color night vision cameras. Do I still need the AI port?

Is there a way to set up event trigger recording with 3rd party cameras? My Amcrest cams are only able to ALWAYS record or NO recording. This really isn't "compatibility" for 3rd party cams IMO.

Ndaa compliant?

Hows it compare to synology surveillance station?

Great video! Thanks!

one small step to grab the entire market, x265

G4 DOME cams are terrible design to mount it

The industry leader is a hell of a stretch. Getting better, but I have a long way to go to be the industry leader.

Is the data at rest encrypted?

do they support H265 and H.265 Plus?

When I first tried Protect a few years ago I hated it and found it was nowhere close to the performance of my Axis cameras on Synology Surveillance Station. Now Protect blows Surveillance Station clean out of the water. I'm gradually swapping out the Axis cameras as they go EOS or fail for Protect cameras.

What camera system should a poor buy

Do i own my data exclusively? Do i have to use the cloud? Am i guaranteed never to need to pay a monthly subscription? If the answer is no to any ....

Industry leader? Hahahaha. The land of stupid always disappoints.

Great product hamstrung by poor availability. I'd sell them into more projects if only I had a reliable supply. It's hard to bid a project only to find that the chosen models are no longer in stock, and lead time unknown.

Excellent review; thanks!

Making the sharing of a camera available only in enterprise makes unifi start to move out of the consumer arena

Having a camera viewable by a third party so they can check in on say a pet or elderly person shouldn't be an enterprise offering nor should you have to share all your cameras to allow someone to access just one if your cameras, most other cameras manufacturers allow anyone to share a camera via a link without paying more

I get the gaming unifi will move me and more into enterprise and leave the average consumer in the dust

I am waiting for someone to make a video regarding Ubiquiti cameras vs Dahua (or similar) cameras so people can see UI cameras are really poor in performance but are pro at costing more money.

@Lawrence Systems - I would like to mention one thing that I believe should be clarified. I spent months working with Unifi to determine why my Smart Detections no longer work. Although you are correct in stating that they do not require a cloud connection to use the system, After the upgrade from 4.72.38 to 5.0.45, Unifi did switch require you to connect to their cloud to be able to use this feature. It does still process locally however they have taken away the ability to use smart detect unless you tie it to their cloud, (Enable Remote Access) and accept the EULA.

Protect has been the best investment I have ever made. I started my installer journey with unifi when it was just the regular dream machine. All these years later with a ton of hiccups on the way in terms of wants, they have a competitive system that puts so many other systems to shame on just how easy it is to use alone. Looking forward to future with protect and knowing I’ll have more installs because of how great it is!

Protect gets better and better as every month goes buy. UI is on fires these days!

If you just want cameras to be in the same eco system, then fine I suppose, but some of them have bad video quality compared to pretty much anything else. Now maybe this isn't a priority for everyone, but paying 2-6x for the quality they provide, just to be in a ecosystem, is kind of crazy. The 3rd party support is the best thing they could have done though.

Anyone know if unifi cameras work with open source software such as frigate or scyrpted?

Appreciate your insight on Protect. After a decade with Synology Surveillance Station and being dissatisfied with some of their recent changes (ex dropped hvec support) and unavailability of their own cameras (out of stock for over a year), have decided to try Protect. Picked up the AI Turret and UDMPM. Will miss some features like smart time lapse and automatic footage archival, but hope Ubiquiti will add those features in the future.

Just sitting here drooling over this system wishing that I could convince my place of employment to only offer these to customers from now on. I have no say in the matter and the people that sell and install them have absolutely nothing to do with them post-install. We have 200+ Geovision systems deployed to customers and I am one of a small number of people responsible for maintaining and monitoring them for customers and I don't know if there could be a worse system for the scale of deployments that we have. Just the most bizarrely designed software that requires at least weekly checks to make sure it hasn't just stopped recording for no reason. No smart detection function whatsoever, just raw motion detection. That includes dust, spiderwebs, the grain on the video itself. Finding incidents is nightmarish because either hours of nothing was recorded or nothing at all was recorded. Pardon my rant.

Any comments about the availability.. all of this is a fun to play with and you really have to find pockets when you can order something’s. But more often then not I come back to buy something and it’s sold out. Incredible what they’ve done but twice in one week I was hitting a wall because I just couldn’t get the stuff.. they’re not supply isn’t keeping up with their innovation or demand..

not exactly about unifi but is anybody switching to unifi AP from TPlink because of the ban on the routers ?

Doesn’t seem to have an officially supported method of remote backup of video recordings.

The best part is that no one at Apple wanted to listen to Robert. So he left and started Ubiquiti right out of San Carlos! Now, he's literally a billionaire.

I have been using unifi protect for my house, a few g5 PTZ cameras. and now I have a little baby and I use a g4 instant as a baby monitor cam and I love watching her in her little crib.

Unifi has helped make this moment special for me and my wife who also uses the app as a baby monitor.

will not be an industry leader until protect can be self hosted like the old nvr software. Digital Watchdog, Milestone XProtect, etc all all professional systems that have self hosted and hardware based systems.

FYI ENVR’s can’t be stacked. Says so right on support and mentions those looking for more should use vantage point.

What industry is that? Every IT professional that I know puts them at the kiddie table in the Mom's basement geek club.

I’m using Blue Iris and have for years. I’ve upgraded ALL of my network except my router (pfsense) to unifi. Would the unifi protect be worth moving to?

The only thing I wish it had for third party (onvif) was record on motion. Maybe that is not possible since as you say the processing is done in the camera.