One of their higher end routers is capable of routing near 10g speeds. I’ve had my eye on and have been wanting to try pFsense as an alternative to both Mikrotik and Ubiquiti. There’s something about them I can’t put my finger on that just doesn’t inspire me with confidence even tho all evidence points to them being solid devices. “Shrugs” - to me they have always had kinda a “meh” factor. By no means “terrible” just sometimes a few gremlins especially on the USG Unifi side of Ubiquiti.Īs for Mikrotik they are solid I work for a small WISP that runs several hundred houses through one of the Mikrotik red faced routers.
This to me is a huge pro over unifi ecosystem and the USGs as routers.įrom what I’ve heard and read Ubiquiti software tends to lag behind on features. It’s not part of the “unifi” lineup so doesn’t need a dedicated controller tho it can be controlled by UNMS.
Love it, it can route at near line speed. Lots of options hope some of that helped!
I believe the code base is forked from ArubaOS, so that lends a good vote of confidence to its stability, as well. Or, for a non-discretely controlled product, you could do Aruba Instant On, which has the controller embedded.
A bit on the high end of your budget, but you'll be free to run any firewall/routing distro you want, and drive all your traffic via CPU, well north of 1Gb/s, without having to worry that platform's hardware acceleration capabilities, and thus not worry about bottlenecking your WAN either.įor wifi, you could certainly run something like UniFi (I would run at least one of their switches, as well, to get total access layer control and visibility).
Something like a Protectli (Qotom) high-clock Celeron. I think it would make a lot more sense to run your preferred distro (be that OpenWRT, pfSense or whatever) on generic x86 embedded hardware - very low-power, fanless and compact, but way more powerful than your typical MIPS or ARM all-in-ones. (UniFi isn't really that extensible at all, so I've excluded the Dream Machine or UDM Pro from consideration) EdgeOS is more flexible, being a Debian derivative (Vyatta fork) that allows for package installs, but unless you're willing to fork out for a $1700 ER Infinity, the 1Ghz MIPS in the ER-4/6/12 will limit you to 400-500 Mb/s total throughput in-software. If it were not for the extensibility piece, you could probably get away with Mikrotik RouterOS or Ubiquiti EdgeOS, but ROS doesn't allow package installs, and while they do offer a few plugins of their own, they're not very diverse. Including what "extra" stuff you have implemented with your equipment to make your home network better. As mentioned I'm new to these products, so I'm really open to any ideas, just would like to read some real-life experience from actual users. Besides that honestly I'm stuck.Īsk for the community: please come up with some pro / con arguments regarding these vendors and their devices. Regarding Mikrotik their hap ac2 sounds like a good entry model, with Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X comes to my mind. What I'm reading about Ubiquiti: it needs a dedicated controller, which repels me to some extent (maybe I just need a mindset change.) What I'm reading about Mikrotik: steep learning curve. Manageability: I don't care much, I can learn anything I would like to keep my current adblock functionality (at least DNS based), allow proper monitoring and logging of DNS queries, WAN bandwidth, connectivity (periodic ICMP / TCP pings to random Internet servers), latency, etc.
I know there is no guarantee at all, but I don't want to rely on a rarely updated and vulnerable firmware (one of the reasons I moved to WRT from the age old stock firmware.)īuilt-in support for VPN (IPSec) nice to haveīeing extensible. Integrated AC wifi nice to have, but I'll need to have dedicated APs anyway due to my home is literally cut into two with a thick concrete wall in the middle (everything else is drywall) Internet router able to NAT at least 1Gbps WAN Let's see what capabilities and features I'm looking for:
In my research 2 vendors came to the picture: Mikrotik and Ubiquiti. Well, if I'd devote some time to put all my wishes together, honestly I'm about to do it on a proper device, also which might have better support / ecosystem. Let's say I experimented with some proof of concept, but that's all. I know it is possible, played around with some stuff, but nothing serious. Having said that I never put much efforts into OpenWRT, its modules, extensions or scripting. One hand I'm a geek and having some ideas on my wishlist I would like to implement for a long time, but on the other hand while OpenWRT being versatile, the Linksys / Tplink hardware I'm using with are let's say so crappy. Hello there, so for a long time I only had "standard" SOHO routers, recently (last 8-10 years or so.) using them with DD, then Open-WRT, but nothing special.