The unifi stuff just works, but the included storage with the cloud key (their hardware NVR for small deployments) only comes with a 1tb drive. I have considered upgrading that drive, but for now I only have it set to record when cameras detect motion, and with 6 cameras I’ve yet to come to a point where I wanted to pull a recording from after it’s been purged due to space. But there are times that I wish I had recording always turned on, I just haven’t done that yet.

I almost went with my qnap NVR solution too, but it was time to replace the cameras I had as well, since my outdoor cameras didn’t have working microphones.

The biggest factor for me in the process was ease of setup / Wife Approval Factor. I setup our Blue Iris system just before we had our first kid, and now that we have two kids, I have almost no time to tinker / fix / upgrade my self hosted things, so the unifi protect was the solution that ticked most of the boxes.

I used blue iris for close to 5 years. The drawbacks being that it only runs on a windows machine, and that machine needs a some kind of gpu to get any kind of reasonable performance.

I switched to Unifi Protect about 6 months ago, and while it’s not as powerful or feature packed as blue iris / frigate, the “it just works” feature is worth it for my sanity.