I have heard others say the same as you about Ubiquiti devices. I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit.
I've only been using Ubiquiti as a pro-sumer, but it has held up well for my use case of Plex and little game servers.
I use a Synology NAS for my storage though, which is a slightly beefier mobile AMD chipset.
I'd be very interested to know what I should and shouldn't expect from my ARM based network stack though!
Basic routing and switching - expect line speed. Don't expect analysis features to run at line speed - 30-50% penalty could be normal depending on throughput.
Stay away from IPS and complicated firewall rules which usually are done in CPU, and you should be fine. HW acceleration for those (esp. TLS decryption) is a major reason fancy firewalls are very expensive. You're better off building an IDS or picking up a smaller FortiGate or Palo Alto firewall if you really want to get serious there.
The Cloud Key Gen 2 is underpowered depending what you do with it, and it runs hot. UniFi seriously needs to refresh it. (At least it’s better than the Gen 1. The Gen 1 was disastrously bad.)
The ENAS looks like fairly nice hardware. It even has ECC RAM. Not cheap, though.
> I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit.
1. My UDM Pro absolutely chokes and stalls with intrusion detection enabled on the firewall and 8 cameras connected. Network goes down, cameras disconnect, devices disconnect from Wi-Fi every time a car drives past a camera due to AI features triggering, etc.
For something meant for small businesses I wish they would just shove an Intel i5 or something in it. They make great switches, great APs, great everything else, just too stingy on processors on the few pieces of central equipment that people would actually be willing to spend more on.
And for a $3999 enterprise NAS with dual 25 Gbps SFP ports and 16 drives? It could surely use something more beefy than a Neoverse N2. I'd say an i7 or even i9 is warranted here.
3. The UNAS 8 I don't own but I believe it would struggle with >1Gbps links and encryption enabled