I’ve been disappointed with every consumer grade router out there. Countless bugs from annoying hiccups to a daily reboot. I feel like I’ve replaced my router every couple of years, never spending less than $150, up to $250.
Finally I splurged for a UniFi Dream Machine a couple of months ago and I could not be happier.
Nothing against the OpenWrt folks of course, but the reason these projects exist is the router vendors just suck. I won’t give them any more of my $ (Linksys, Netgear, ASUS in my case.)
That was my thinking with going with MerlinWRT. I splurged and got an Asus ax88u, then spent two weeks trying to get it to work before returning it.
I do think part of the issue is WiFi technology is diverse enough that the latest and greatest are optimized around 5Ghz and newer specs whereas a lot of IOT (which I use) is still old school 2.4.
Anyway I tried OpenWRT for a while but went back to DD-WRT on an Archer C9 which has been just about perfect for my usage.
I generally agree but I'm heading back from a trip to Russia and I was surprised by how good Keenetic's [0] equipment was. It's a brand that apparently only operates in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey.
I was impressed because of how clean and workable the stock web UI is, as well as how many features it has. They have some of the more obscure normal things like IGMP proxying (with a very user-friendly UI for configuring it) but what really impressed me was that it even had WireGuard support as an official installable package.
I'll stick with my UBNT gear at home but still, for a consumer brand Keenetic is pretty nice.
I've just installed openwrt on mikrotik hap ac router. Damn that thing is nice. The UI is way more user friendly and expandable. Built-in pi-hole analog (adblock) works just fine, wpa3 support is also there. And all that is installed in just a few clicks.
Couldn't agree more. Consumer grade routers are all buggy or have some proprietary features that just don't work with Openwrt.
I've been using ASUS based routers for the last ~10 years (with Openwrt) and a few months ago decided to upgrade to something else.
After researching what routers are out there, I ended up getting a Turris Omnia [~320 eur].
It's running a fork of Openwrt. Can probably run vanilla Openwrt without too many issues.
There's also Turris Mox - a modular design from the same people, but I ended up getting Turris Omnia, since they pack 2gb of RAM into that router and it has 3 miniPCIe slots on it.
Consumer grade routers are all buggy or have some proprietary features that just don't work with Openwrt.
Not sure how much it's still the case, but for a long time there were a bunch that worked just fine with OpenWRT as long as it was the forked 3 generation old version that was the official firmware.
I agree that much of the problem is the hardware. I went through several cheap routers before I finally found one that was stable after a year of use. That one worked great for >8 years.
I just upgraded, and went with a device intended to be a commercial AP, but since it has two Ethernet jacks, it makes a great router under Openwrt. So far, it seems pretty good, but I'll be happier if I see uptimes of more than a year.
I must admit I’m a big fan of the UniFi stuff too - for prosumer use it’s excellent, has a tonne of features and for the most part is fairly stable. Just a shame that sometimes they abandon hardware a bit too soon, or promise features that never materialise.
Finally I splurged for a UniFi Dream Machine a couple of months ago and I could not be happier.
Nothing against the OpenWrt folks of course, but the reason these projects exist is the router vendors just suck. I won’t give them any more of my $ (Linksys, Netgear, ASUS in my case.)