U7 Pro XGS

One of my access points can handle 500 clients. https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/u7-pro-xgs This one handles over 1,000 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wifi-enterprise/collections/pro-e7-campus/products/e7-campus-u I'd start moving away from wifi smart home devices. They arent as stable, most are connected to the cloud vs local and they're competing for your wifi bandwidth.

Happy to share. Just so you know, those access points need other equipment to work. Worth checking out /r/unifi if you want to go that way to ask for recommendations. Just dont believe the regular posts are representative of a typical setup. Call me a skeptic, but I do not believe most 1200 sqft homes need $3k in networking gear for a "first rack".

Wifi devices are power hogs, noisy, and not the most secure mechanism. There are other radios people often use for home automation. The rub is you need a hub to control them. Zwave, Zigbee, and Thread being popular ones. I use home assistant for home automation running on an old mini pc. I have radios for all three. - Zwave: Great for security and distance. Its where I got started in home automation - Zigbee: large ecosystem with lots of sensors, light bulbs (hue uses zigbee for alot of things) and all sorts of others - Thread: The new hotness. Some brands like ikea are going all in on thread

Thread and matter havent fully matured yet. Still more flash than bang. That said it's quickly changing with more companies switching to thread. For now Zigbee has broader device options and more stability. The win is having a device that lets you use any radio you want. I have zwave devices that are 12 years old. No need to get rid of them, but I can run wifi, BLE, zigbee, and thread too. For now I'm mostly focused on the best device vs being on one standard.

Unifi is just for your wifi. There are mesh routers like eero that are also thread border routers. However, many Amazon devices also have thread border routers (three of my Alexa's do as an example). If you have an alexa, Google home, apple tv or home pod the you likely already have some initial potential to connect and automate your wifi and other devices. It's worth checking those out to see if you like them and it meets your needs. For me, I went to home assistant because I wanted it to not only do more, but behave exactly as I desire with alot of nuance, custom dashboard and more.

Second this. Switched from Orbi mesh which was giving me heaps of issues to this exact UniFi setup and all my Sonos gear works flawlessly now.

Ubiquity hands down. Their WiFi 7 gear is reasonably priced too

Get ubiquity. Fuck that other crap. I tried all that other shit you are looking at, get a couple WiFi 7 access points and a gateway and have some reliable easy to upgrade stuff. If your existing Poe is the 48 volt Poe+ stuff you won’t need to get Poe injectors or Poe switches for the access points. Since I went this route I do t know what to do with my free time, as I am not battling my iot shit disconnecting and going off line.

I've used Netgear Orbi, Eero, and Ubiquiti UniFi WiFi 7 systems all long term. If you want an excellent ecosystem all behind one very sleek pane of glass WITH better performance and reliability and control than the other stuff, just get UniFi. The only caveat is lack of a dedicated wireless backhaul channel but this is often inconsequential because of better range and overall bandwidth. If you want to set it and forget it and have tolerance when a forced botched firmware update is pushed with no rollback option, consider Eero.