I would say it's nice enough for more than just "small" stuff. Depending on your definition of "small", I guess.
I'm running a VyOS machine (old desktop with a couple of NICs) which handles the traffic for our Copenhagen office. That's ~15 CI boxes, and 30 people. This is on a 100/100 connection.
For Ubiquiti, I'm a fan. I helped our co-working space setup a network on another floor, and we used an EdgeRouter Lite to handle the 200/200 connection. The ERL handles it without breaking a sweat. That's for 60 people on a daily basis.
For another building, I just finished setting up an ERPro (the 8-port rack-mounted version). It's again on a 200/200 connection, and for roughly 150 people on average, with a maximum around 300-500.
At home, I have an ERPoE, which handles my home lab just perfectly. I'm only on a 100/100 uplink at the moment, but will be upgraded to 1000/500 soon, and I know the ERPoE will handle that just fine as well (thank you hardware offloading ;)). 5 VLANs with full firewalling and routing between them, native IPv6 with prefix delegation, mDNS proxying between VLANs, OpenVPN handled by the router. I could do a lot of this with OpenWRT on an Archer C7, but the ERPoE is simply miles ahead.
The UI is nice for newcomers, and the CLI is amazing. I fell in love with the CLI on VyOS, and am very happy to see the same in the UBNT products. For $100, they are amazing devices. VyOS is my go-to choice when I need to have a virtual router.
are you talking about vyos or ubiquiti. Im not sure what the relationship is between them - could you talk about what's so amazing for a complete first timer?
VyOS is just software. So nothing to purchase there. It's what I use when I need either a virtual router, or want to use commodity hardware to act as a router. It's great to throw in ESXi or another hypervisor, or even EC2. It comes with all features you might need (probably), and because it's fairly standard Linux (Debian based), making it do extra things isn't very hard.
The ERL is $100, and comes with Ubiquiti's EdgeOS, which is largely based on VyOS (or something like that), and simply adds a (decent) web UI, and hardware offloading. This means that the ERL which runs on a dual core 700Mhz MIPS CPU can route 1Gbit/s, and not even break 30% CPU utilisation.
Where VyOS shines is when you need to cobble together a bunch of things. If you just need a pure firewall, I would probably stick with pfsense, as that is, after all, what it is good at. VyOS only offers iptables with some lipstick (which is well enough for a Swiss-army knife setting)
I guess VyOS would run on that box. I can't see specs, nor know what network chipset it is rocking, but I don't see why not.
It looks like maybe this project forked after the purchase by Brocade.
As a side not Vyatta is the base OS in many of the Ubiquiti Networks routers. It's quite nice for small office/ home office.