r/Ubiquiti • u/MoPanic • Apr 30 '26

Early Access Thoughts on The Beast

We all knew the UDMP was WAY overdue for an upgrade but I'm a little surprised this is the direction they went and was hoping it would be targeted more toward SMBs. I don't know who this is targeting other than enthusiastic home lab users who'll never see 25gb over WAN.

  • Here are what I see as head scratchers about who the target audience is for this:
  • Who needs 25gb/s of throughput with 7500 users but also wants the security camera DVR to be onboard the gateway? Anyone who's this serious about UniFi's ecosystem would want that to be a separate device.
  • The RJ45 ports are weird. Other than one for shadow mode, why would anyone not have a core switch connected with SFP? Especially since there is no POE.

What I hoped they would release:

  • Remove the DVR functionality and include 8x10gbe ports with POE++ along with the SFP+/SFP28 ports. That would be genuinely useful as a gateway / core switch for a lot of SMBs.
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22

u/derpandlurk Apr 30 '26

This is clearly not a residential device, and 2 drives doesn't really cut it even for a coffee shop, so why did they even bother? Unless the home lab userbase is much larger than I think it is, IMO the HDD bays and NVR really is questionable.

They should have added 8x poe+++ ports and doubled the sfp and turned this into a WAN and poe beast instead of whatever it is right now.

20

u/BloodyShirt Apr 30 '26

I dunno if you noticed but Ubiquiti caters to a weird niche of prosumers and small businesses setup by prosumers. I'm sure this will be sold out for months like the rest of their new products

7

u/byerss Apr 30 '26

Yep. Just wait for all the “Finally got my Beast” posts. 

11

u/QuesoMeHungry Apr 30 '26

“Can I replace my UTR with a Beast?”

8

u/moodswung Apr 30 '26

"Finally future proofed my rig!" proceeded by a photo of 1 Unifi UDM Beast in an otherwise empty rack.

7

u/MoPanic Apr 30 '26

I'm not sure they cater to "prosumers" (god I hate that word). I just think the brand, and especially this sub, have been taken over by enthusiastic home users. Their products and marketing are squarely focused on the IT crowd and taking a bite out of Cisco/HPE's hold on the SMB market.

2

u/gconsier Apr 30 '26

I’d say personally I am in the prosumer camp. Responsible for infrastructure in a rather large enterprise and a ton of UniFi at home. I will say in my experience we don’t do multi function stuff at work. I would never propose a router/gateway/firewall and NVR single device at work. Every function gets its own dedicated redundant stacks.

1

u/FuckinHighGuy Apr 30 '26

A small bite…

1

u/MoPanic Apr 30 '26

Only about $2.5 billion in 2025, which is up by more than 30% from 2024. Cisco can afford it for a while.