You have to understand what this device is before you pull the trigger. This is the exact same thing as a Unifi Controller system coupled with their Unifi Protect software and a dedicated hard drive all inside a neat little package with a dedicated management interface. You can easily pick up a Raspberry Pi 3+ for $35, a POE hat for $30, a 1TB hard drive for cheap and have almost the exact same thing minus the fancy case with the onboard screen and device manager. Honestly, for the home IT demons out there who love to tinker I would even recommend that route. Another option, if you already have a server running VMs, you could easily build a headless Linux VM running Debian. Carve off 4GB of memory, dedicate a couple CPU cores or load balance across more and dedicate a physical hard drive for to it for video.

However, what these guys have done with this device is very impressive. This is a solid product for the footprint both in power consumption and size. I'd buy it again only so I wouldn't have to tinker with the server side of things. This device makes network management of Unifi APs and Cams super simple.

The major con I have about this device though, vendor lock-in on the IP cameras. There's no option to add existing 3rd party cameras to the system.

I was running The free software NVR (network video recorder) from Ubiquity to test my G3 Micro camera. Since this did such a good job, I decided to pick up this box instead of leaving a computer running 24/7.

First surprise: It doesn't come with a power adapter. Fortunately, I had a POE switch to use in the right location.
Second surprise: It uses the Unifi Protect app rather than Unify Video I was using previously.

The apps are a bit different. Unifi Video was a little more intuitive and has some different features than Unify Protect. For example, Protect allows geofencing but Video has more control over recording and motion detection.

There are a lot of features that can talk nicely to other Ubiquity Unifi products like routers, switches, and access points. Unfortunately it doesn't communicate with the Ubiquity Amplifi products like the mesh router I have. It also won't talk to non-Ubiquity cameras which is a shame because I would change over my EagleEye Networks system if Protect would use the cameras. It would be a large investment for me to replace all of my existing cameras.

However, with all it's faults, this system beats the heck out of the consumer cameras I tried. The apps have a much shorter buffering time and better quality video. I had trouble with other cameras systems just stopping notifications and require a reboot to start them again. In addition, I had problems with app updates breaking things badly. For example, one update on IOS wouldn't let the app connect anymore (but the Android update worked fine).

Pros: Great video, good notifications
Cons: Takes a bit of effort to configure it properly. For example, I needed to replace the web server certificate with one that the browsers see as secure. This took some hunting on the internet to figure out how to do it via ssh to copy the certificate over, and run a script to install and restart the services.

I've had this little guy running 7x24 for six months with no issues, zip, nada. One upgrade you should do right off the bat is to change the hard drive to a high performance SSD with more capacity than 1TB unless you are only going to run two or three cams. I'm using a 2TB Samsung V-Nand SSD 860 EVO SATA 6Gb/s and I'm running 12 G3 cams and one G4 cam. I only get about one week of recorded video and would like a 4TB SSD but they are really expensive. The Android "Protect" app works well. The user interface is well designed for both the network management and Protect. Simple and intuitive.

Before this I was using Ubiquiti's NVR box for the cameras and it was a complete disaster, very unreliable and undependable, slow. So that now sits on the shelf with all of the other orphans.

Cons: I really haven't discovered any. This little box sits in my rack and does its thing - it's happy and I'm happy.

I love that it is a controller and NVR at the same time. I have the 150w Ubiquiti POE switch, two Ubiquiti APs, and two Flex G3 cams and it controls all of them with no issue. No noticeable lag so far on video.

Another pro is that if a baddie broke in and tried looking for the NVR, it doesn't look like an NVR at all. About the size of an external optical drive.

The only con would be that Unifi Protect did not offer scheduled alerts but the latest revision adds this functionality in the web interface.

Runs a little hot but it hasn't impacted performance. Since it is fanless this is to be expected.

I hope they offer Geofencing functionality in the future.

I've become very fond of Ubiquiti and the Unifi line. I'm pretty novice when it comes to networking and setting up my Unifi network and surveillance system has been genuinely fun. It's been a great learning experience and I've even played with the idea of taking it a step further looking into careers. Unifi has its faults but the cloud key was really straightforward for me. No regrets.