Uniqiti has several product ranges; the EdgeMax line is the advanced one; Unifi is the simple one.
Yes, you can set up simple things with Unifi in a simple way, but the more advanced ones are a tragedy, that you must also google around, dig wikies and forums for arcane incantations of the right json keys, so you can deploy your config in json, there are even no arcane settings to click.
I don't think the EdgeMax is the 'advanced' line by any stretch. They both run a fork of Vayatta and share a CLI. The Unifi stuff has more features accessible via the GUI and receives far more attention from Ubiquity.
However, the biggest and most major difference between the two lines of products is the requirement of the Controller to run the Unifi line of devices. For that simple fact I would pin the Unifi line as more 'advanced'.
The controller and the sdn concept is exactly the difference.
They might share CLI, but that does not mean that your changes persist on USG. You can rely only on whatever you configured in GUI and half-rely on gateway.config.json; for example, they both have dnsmasq and I'm still figuring out how to configure it, so the changes persist. It would be otherwise trivial on edgemax or other pure dnsmasq-using system, like openwrt.
