Very happy to see this, I thought they were going to be pulling away from self-hostable and more flexible solutions a few years back when they stopped developing things like Unifi Video, but they seem to have made many positive movements towards openness, true ownership and self-hostability lately.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
68 points (95.9% liked)
Selfhosted
60366 readers
593 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil.
-
No spam.
-
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
-
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
They mention in the post that other apps are coming soon. If they start letting you self host Protect, that will be huge. When they killed off Video, the only way to get their cameras to work was to buy their hardware that could run Protect. I was shocked when they allowed you to use 3rd party cameras in Protect.
They still push their exclusive features and services in the UI's pretty hard, but I’m OK with that while they are making moves like this, and letting you have third party cameras mixed into their ecosystem reasonably easily.
Wait didn't they kill off the self hosted a few years ago? Now it's back?
They required online accounts briefly before they backed down after pushback
I'm running a container,
And?
Way to leave us hanging by that comma 😅
So this is a way to run virtualized UniFi controllers per client? What’s the benefit of this over proxmox+linux hosting?
Site manager with cloud and on prem hosted in a single view. The benefit is for MSPs.
I'm still using an old UC Gateway, doubt my homelab will outgrow it.
I decommissioned mine, I had it and to access points. When I moved, I replaced it with a dream machine se pro. I really wanted DPI and IDS at my full internet speed. I strongly considered just throwing a bunch of their access points up and crafting a firewall out of a PC. Run ntopng on it. In the end the sweet siren song of a cohesive, single interface, completely managed network won out.
Time, metrics, I have 7 access points, if one starts getting high noise, I get a message and can move it. If I want to put my TV on it's own vlan, I can see what switch it's on and what port, change the vlan from my phone in a handful of clicks
Updates, backups. For their issues, they also have a lot of creature comforts.
I ran Cisco for years. I spent more time on Cisco in most week than I have post setup on unifi and uniform has more features.
I've got Unifi Network installed in a container on my home server. I have also an custom-built router, because it is much more powerful than any appliance and does not cost as much.
They still have mediocre support for IPv6
MSP's ??
I think it stands for Managed Service Providers.
I am, the UniFi Java blob that runs on MongoDB. I use it for my 802.11ac access points, although not very often.
I really want to move to openwrt on them (not a big fan of how Ubiquiti treats out-of-support hardware), but I'm scared of taking the big plunge of managing them all with a unified interface. There exist projects to do just this, I guess it's the work to set it all up.
OpenWISP?
That's the one. It's a bit daunting and I have a caldav migration to complete and some offsite backups to get done first.
They were working pretty hard to wall their garden. This looks promising but I remain sceptical.