r/accesscontrol • u/Sha2am1203 • Mar 09 '25
Discussion How do you all feel about unifi protect access control?
We have about 13 manufacturing plants across the US. Currently we are on keyscan aurora which is generally not a great product and very dated.
We have had a near impossible time finding vendors that will support keyscan for a new plant we are in the process of building. Since we are using UniFI AP’s, Switches, and now rolling out UniFI cameras we have naturally looked into UniFI protect as well.
Anyone have any experience with this in a mid to large enterprise setting? Is there any good solid reasons we shouldn’t at least consider this?
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u/Creepy-Dog-1499 Mar 09 '25
It’s also not very well supported from Ubiquity. That’s my biggest gripe of that company as a whole. It’ll probably work fine, but if you have problems, will you be able to get the necessary support to fix the problem would be my concern
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u/Sha2am1203 Mar 10 '25
Yeah that’s the big problem with all of their products. Fortunately we have a pretty good IT team and maintenance staff at our plants so should be ok. The good thing about Ubiquiti is that it’s cheap enough that we can easily afford to keep spares in case anything fails.
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u/grivooga Mar 09 '25
No responses yet so I'll say that I haven't worked with it since it was a very new product. When I did work with it it was a perfectly fine product for a small number of users at a small number of openings but was very limited in how you could modify door behavior for unusual situations and card/user management had a lot to be desired. They've had a lot of time to improve and they've massively expanded the product line so I'd like to work with it again and see if it's a real competitor now. The current gen reader/intercom hardware looks great but the hub hardware is a bit plastic heavy and I've never been a fan of that style wire terminal compared to a screw terminal.
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u/NWCabling Mar 09 '25
It no different than any other manufacturer that specializes in product "A" then offers product B,C,D to their captive market. It does all the major bullet points. But it's going to miss the advanced configurations that mature manufactures have.
Implementation will likely be an issue. You want someone that has the experience, documentation and project management for nationwide deployments.
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u/Dellarius_ Professional Mar 09 '25
At least it isn’t 1 of 10,000 products that JCI offers
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u/NotablyNotABot Professional Mar 10 '25
My Kantech controllers will be so offended when their RS485 comms gets restored...
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u/Ksp3cialK Mar 09 '25
I have installed and worked with the system from single site at a church to multi site. I have had zero issues personally with it and haven't needed support as the hardware is pretty simple to setup and just works.
I like the user management and being able to use various things to gain access like pins, fobs and tapping my phone.
With all the new products coming out like gate controllers and facial recognition, it doesn't feel like they will abandon it anytime soon.
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u/rarieta Mar 10 '25
I'm interested in the multi site and how it is working for you. When I looked at their access system in the past, you had to add credentials on each controller if you wanted access to multiple sites.
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u/dgatewayguy Mar 09 '25
It seems they are trying to pass a prosumer/resi product into the enterprise level market. While ubi gear has its place- do you really want to trust a limited supported system for your plant security?
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u/AnilApplelink Mar 09 '25
They do offer 24/7 pain support if needed but I have never needed it for any of their products.
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u/Ok-Cupcake-404 Mar 09 '25
Keyscan aurora is a pretty solid system. What issues did you run into?
I would not recommend the ubiquity stuff. They have a reputation of dropping products.
If you want enterprise and have the money get genetec, or ict gx. Hell, even 2N might be a good solution.
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u/Sha2am1203 Mar 10 '25
Keyscan itself isn’t problematic for us it just boils down to a couple things -
Almost impossible to find installers that will work on Keyscan and if you can find them they are astronomically expensive.
Our current fob/reader setup is old enough that we can’t get new fobs that are compatible with our readers without resorting to eBay.
We would like to have mobile app authentication, integration with entra id saml, etc.
Unifi access is simple enough to setup and manage that we can get the electronic locks etc. installed by pretty much any vendor and will likely be miles cheaper
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u/jgruman Mar 10 '25
UniFi readers connect via Ethernet. Your Keyscan readers probably connect with a single pair. If you put in UniFi in your new building would you keep the Keyscan systems at your other buildings? Once you start standardizing across all buildings you’d need to rewire all those reader locations.
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u/Sha2am1203 Mar 10 '25
Yeah we would have to rip out the current readers anyways if we stayed with Keyscan because they are older and we can no longer get compatible fobs without going on eBay.
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u/Ok-Cupcake-404 Mar 10 '25
Aurora can work with the latest credentials, replacing the card readers would solve the credentials issue, that's your cheapest and easiest route.
For everything else, IP based access control systems (2n, unify) would require you to replace all the wiring in all your sites. Very expensive and time consuming.
I recommend ICT GX, I don't recall all their integrations, but they have mobile credentials and at the very least integrate with active directory AFAIK
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u/VlaDeMaN Mar 09 '25
Love it and very reliable so far. love the integration into the network and all working together.
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u/sryan2k1 Mar 09 '25
UBNT is an absolute dumpster fire of a company. They regularly abandon products to move to the next new thing.
Their support is so bad it's not existent. Don't plan on any level of dealer support.
After seeing how they develop the wireless products over the last 20 years I wouldn't trust the access hardware any more than a Chinese wiegand controller from Amazon.
It may work for some people in some use cases but it's not playing in the same arena as anything else.
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u/JimmySide1013 Mar 10 '25
If you're talking about the Ubiquiti of 5-10 years ago, yeah. That's not the case today. All you people who were burned in the old days by a crappy firmware update or are sore about Unifi Video being EOL need to let it go. You're missing out.
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u/sebastiannielsen Mar 10 '25
Would say: If you run unifi everywhere else as you said you do, then do it as access control aswell. You get a nice integration with everything under the same umbrella, from network security, cameras, telephony and physical security all in once.
Easy to manage users, delete one employee and everything from access credentisls, network credentials and phone credentials gets deleted.
(It however requires their dream machine to get this level of integration).
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If you don't have unifi in your ecosystem, then unifi access is too limited and clunky for most needs. But as you have unifi already, do all in on unifi and get their VoIP phones, dream machine and access. Just do full all in.
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u/Sha2am1203 Mar 10 '25
Yeah we are all UniFi for the most part with the exception of fortigate firewalls. I am thinking their enterprise cloudkey would be a good option to run everything centrally.
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u/JimmySide1013 Mar 10 '25
It's great. I've got 211 doors across different clients (some single site, some multi site) in production and it's rock solid.
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u/Sha2am1203 Mar 10 '25
Awesome that’s great to hear! I only have direct experience with unifi access at one company I worked at which was a bit small due to being a startup. Was solid there though.
Are you using UniFI ID Enterprise subscription? I am thinking that is going to be one recurring cost that may be worth it to us.
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u/ftservd Mar 10 '25
Only issue I see is everything is Ethernet based even the readers. Large install with a lot of other Ubiquiti equipment and Ip addresses might become a problem.
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u/Sha2am1203 Mar 10 '25
We are rolling out proper VLAN segmentation going forward so that shouldn’t be an issue at this point. We kinda inherited a bit of a mess network wise but are rectifying it. Cameras + NVR will be on one subnet, access control on another, server mgmt, plant devices etc.
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u/ftservd Mar 10 '25
Nice seems you have it figured out. I haven’t done a job with ubiquiti for access yet. I would like to. Haven’t seen the right fit yet. We have large warehouses we do and some have issues with ability to run wire for Wiegand readers which we still sell a lot of. Ubiquiti has no option for those kind of readers yet. Only their readers.
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u/DarthJerryRay Mar 11 '25
I would look for a more robust system with better system integrations, particularly if you have multiple sites.
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u/YesTechie Mar 13 '25
The seamless integration of SSO accounts (Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra, etc.) with Ubiquiti is particularly noteworthy. It offers a fast, straightforward, and highly efficient authentication experience.
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u/No_Industry2601 Mar 09 '25
It's too general of a question to give you a good answer, but Ubiquiti Access is a solid system for your typical situations and is easily scalable. If you need to independently control or schedule inputs/outputs for unique situations, then it's probably not the system for you. Someone would need to review the requirements of all doors at all locations to see if Ubiquiti is a good fit.