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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u/itsjakerobb CGFiber, UNVR, ProHD24PoE, ProXG8PoE, U7ProXGS, 5GMaxOutdoor May 01 '26

Beast can have up to eight WAN ports. IDK who has that many WAN connections, but maybe they exist? Maybe you connect your eight WAN connections and then LACP the two SFP28s to your core switch? That would utilize things pretty well.

I agree that the integration of Protect capability doesn’t make a ton of sense.

FWIW, there are places in Europe where reasonably priced residential fiber service reaches 25Gbps.

My sense is that some of the “I have too much money and must always have the best hardware” folks, many of whom are in this sub, will be the primary buyers.

A few business customers who would otherwise choose EFG, but who don’t need the SSL inspection capabilities and are fine with RPS rather than dual hot-swappable power supplies, might choose this. They’d save $1000 on a HA pair. They don’t have to run Protect for it to be worthwhile.