I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.
The software stack of usability is severely missing. So they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of it well.
In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only does storage.
I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
I seriously want it to work well. How do you find 1 out of 10,000+ pictures you've taken in the last 20 years without spending hours self categorizing beforehand?
I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good stride and just released some pretty solid good value products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without it, it is challenging to ignore how much better of a deal you're getting for the core functionality for sure.
I of course hope people do some level of research before buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people. I do acknowledge Synology DSM has a lot of stuff built in, but frankly most of it just isn't that great.