Only been using it for a few months but it's been good. I moved the config I mentioned above (the three APs) to my parents' house and they haven't had any problems. Throughput in their case is a little limited but that's expected with the installation (no ethernet and a lotta walls). Hasn't needed a reboot or anything.
I just started using an EAP660 HD[1] at home a week ago, so far so good. Haven't topped out the speeds yet because nothing in my house can take advantage, but I have some AX200 cards coming. I understand there's a throughput bug at the moment that's going to be solved in a future firmware fix[0], but my clients don't go fast enough to hit that yet. TP-Link seems to very actively update their firmware for the pieces I've been using, FWIW.
So I've been pretty happy with it so far. Roaming has been fine, though in one case I think I had non-optimally located a couple of APs because my Linux laptop kept rapid-fire flapping between two of them. I believe that's a client-side problem, though.
I did try a Cisco 240AC and its wifi performance was rock solid. The management interface is non-cloud, and I believe covers the whole network, but it lives inside the AP itself, which I don't love. The management UI is buggy and they seem slow to push bugfixes, and when I added a 142ACM to extend my network it started going flaky -- I had to do a factory reset/reconfigure of the 240AC to resolve it, then it happened again a few weeks later -- so I'm gonna flip my Cisco stuff on eBay. :-(
[1] Tip if you adopt one of these in Omada: You need to give Omada the EAP660's password (default "admin"/"admin") for it to successfully adopt. The other APs never required a password to adopt, so it was a little confusing until the internet came to the rescue.
I bought 3 EAP330s and TP-Link deprecated them after a year or so. No more firmware upgrades for their (then) top "enterprise" access points. Rumour says they weren't happy with the chipset, so decided to abandon them altogether (just this model, cheaper ones were on different chipsets and support was available for longer). Last time I checked there was no OpenWRT support of any kind. They did hang when I had port aggregation enabled and seemed to run rather hot. But feature-wise and non-trunked-networking-wise they were fine, supported what I was looking for, no cloud, I didn't even use the controller, you can just manage them "the old school" way. But don't count on years of support.
For what it's worth, we've been running about 15 TP-Link EAP225 in a warehouse without any hiccups so far. Most importantly they don't randomly die or lose the controller pairing like some low end Ubiquiti units tried in the past. The only quirk is that on Windows Server you have to configure the service manually, but it's no big deal. [0]
I also have a TP-Link Omada setup. For layer2 networking with switches and AP's it's fine. Cost effective, reasonably stable, acceptable performance and features that are regularly used are all there.
The layer-3 stuff however is still early days and I can't recommend getting the secure gateway at this time. No IPv6 support. Depends strictly on an internet uplink configuration for default route to which all traffic is then NATted. Can't change that. No real security features, no packet inspection etc. The routing features really feel like an alpha version. They are working on it and have a roadmap to a more workable layer-3 solution. So maybe in the future the will be as nice as the Ubiquity solution.
Cloud is not needed but possible. You can get an OC-200 controller for not much money that fills the role of single pane configuration webinterface. The software for that controller can also be downloaded for Linux on PC or ARM if you want to use your own hardware. Also the network keeps running if the controller is down.
If you login to the OC200, it's under settings > cloud access. It should be off by default. Or you can login to the cloud interface and forget the OC200 under actions.
I run a similar setup with a bunch of EAP-225 APs controlled by a local instance of their Omada software (running on x64 rather that on ARM).
I've been very happy with roaming/throughput/reliability generally. The EAP-225 is 2x2, which they don't readily announce. Their newer and more expensive units are available as 4x4. That being said they're so cheap, I've been happy just to throw more onto the network.
For the software to manage them it uses some kind of multicast identification scheme to find new APs. If you're on a different subnet then it won't be able to automatically see them. They have a tool to connect to the AP and give it the management server IP, but that's Windows only.
The other option (that I went for) is just to create a management VLAN (good practice anyway) that the controller and APs live on. This is specifically supported by the APs.
Great without it. The major improvement I noticed with it, is 802.11k & v (faster handoff).
Without those, it takes a little longer for the device to switch APs at the borders of their coverage. Mostly imperceptible, but the longer handoff times can be enough to kill a phone call over iPhone WiFi calling
