I don’t think they manage traffic through their servers per se. But with (optional) subscription they optimize topology which can avoid nasty congestion from neighbor networks, and customize speed-ups by device and by location.
Dave at MGG is a big fan of that, if you listen to his part of the 5-minute discussion in that podcast I linked to above. When he first tested it out he couldn’t believe how fast it was, and contacted Plume to see what kind of sorcery was involved.
Jim Salter at Arstechnica did hours of comparison testing and found that the optimization worked as advertised, but that "if you let a subscription lapse in the article is correct - you get a very simple topology like what you get when you first fire up the pods before the cloud optimizer reorganizes their topology, you get a simplified interface that still allows you basic configs (change your WiFi password, etc) but you don’t get home pass, don’t get support, don’t get client specific device rules. "
And that default ‘dumb’ mesh connection still wasn’t bad:
Salter’s review is long and comprehensive, and it’s compelling.
If and when 802.11ax compatibility is promised/offered for Plume (it isn’t yet for any mesh network), I’m likely to buy it myself. Dave himself said that for him the two best home mesh networks now are eero and Plume.