Omada Fusion 2.5G lands between UniFi Cloud Gateway Max and Ultra

TP-Link has put a new compact router-plus-controller into the segment UniFi has largely owned for the past two years. The Omada Fusion 2.5G pairs a built-in Omada controller with five 2.5GbE ports, a colour touchscreen and a fanless chassis, and it slots price-wise between the two UniFi cloud gateways most small sites end up choosing between.

Update — August 2026: when this piece first ran, the Fusion 2.5G had no confirmed Australian release. It has since landed. The TP-Link Omada Fusion 2.5G Gateway is now stocked at BUZY at $310.50 inc GST, with stock held across all five branches. Australian pricing and availability have been added below.

The comparison was laid out in detail by LazyAdmin, which put the Fusion alongside the UniFi Cloud Gateway Max and UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra. All three are gateway and controller in one box, all three manage up to 30 devices and 300 clients, and none of them carry a per-device management licence.

For Australian buyers the interesting part is not which box wins a benchmark. It is what you give up in platform terms when you mix vendors at the edge of a network you are going to keep for five years.

How the three gateways line up on paper

Two details are worth pulling out. The Ultra’s LAN side is collectively limited to 1 Gbps regardless of the 2.5G WAN port, so a faster service will not translate into faster internal throughput. And LazyAdmin reports that on the UCG-Max, turning on features such as QoS or NetFlow automatically disables hardware acceleration, which is the mechanism the advertised 2,300 Mbps IDS/IPS figure depends on.

LazyAdmin lists the three at $139 for the Ultra, $169 for the Fusion and $301 for the Max with a 512 GB SSD, in a currency the source does not specify. Locally, the Fusion 2.5G sells for $310.50 inc GST and is held in stock in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. TP-Link rates it at 2.1 Gbps-class IDS/IPS throughput and backs it with a five-year warranty.

Cameras are the real dividing line

The Fusion 2.5G is a networking gateway only. It does not run a video management system, so there is no path to recording cameras on it at all.

The Cloud Gateway Max runs the full UniFi application suite including Protect, and with the 512 GB SSD fitted Ubiquiti states it will record up to 15 HD cameras or five 4K cameras without a separate NVR. That is the whole reason the Max costs what it does.

TP-Link has announced a Fusion Pro 2.5G that combines networking with a VMS supporting up to 24 4K cameras, but pricing and a release date have not been confirmed.

A PoE version is on its way

Separately, TP-Link has a powered variant of the same gateway arriving shortly. The Fusion 2.5G PoE steps up to nine 2.5G ports, eight of them PoE+ on a 110W budget, with up to eight WAN inputs for load balancing and failover. For a small site that would otherwise need a gateway plus a PoE switch, it collapses two boxes into one.

It is open for pre-order now at $577.00 inc GST, with first stock expected imminently. Pre-orders are queued in order received, so anyone who wants one in the first shipment is better off in the queue than waiting for the listing to flip to in-stock.

What staying inside one ecosystem is actually worth

Both vendors offer licence-free cloud management with multi-site support, through omada.tplinkcloud.com and unifi.ui.com respectively, and both have an easy remote-access option — LightLink VPN on Omada, Teleport on UniFi. Day to day, the two consoles cover similar ground.

• TP-Link has a broad Omada line of Wi-Fi 7 access points and managed switches that the Fusion controller drives directly.
• UniFi extends past networking into Protect, door access and intercoms under a single console.
• LazyAdmin notes VPN policy-based routing is already available on UniFi, while on Omada it is in development for SDN v6.5, expected later this year.

BUZY’s take

Competition at this price point is good news, and the Fusion is a genuinely credible product on the networking side. But a gateway is rarely bought in isolation, and the moment you put an Omada gateway in front of UniFi switches and access points you have two controllers, two mobile apps, two firmware schedules and two support paths for one site.

For integrators that fragmentation is the expensive part. The value of the UniFi ecosystem has never really been any single device’s throughput figure — it is that a technician who knows one site knows all of them, and that cameras, door access and networking land in the same console with the same user database.

Our honest read: if you are starting completely fresh, have no surveillance requirement and want maximum 2.5G routing for the money, the Fusion 2.5G deserves a look — and it is on the shelf now rather than a US-only launch, which was not the case when we first wrote this. If you already run UniFi, or expect cameras or door entry within the life of the hardware, the Max remains the coherent choice and the Ultra is still fine for a 1 Gbps service with modest internal traffic.

Originally reported by LazyAdmin.