I have an Archer A20 3.0, an AC4000 home router. It's abandoned: latest firmware is from October 2019. Feature set is limited and dodgy, and it isn't rock-solid reliable.<p>I'm having a lot of trouble wading through options. Finding a good price-to-performance ratio is hard.<p>I'd prefer to future proof with AX. I'd like robust features that include VPN, parental control, reporting, and more.<p>I'd prefer something that could use OpenWRT or similar as a fallback, in case the vendor abandons it or I loose confidence in its firmware. (I've done DD-WRT on a WRT54G, so generally familiar with what all this means.)<p>I think "just a router" is best. I have a single-story house where the A20 permeates everywhere I need with no issues, so I don't think mesh has value. Also, I have no Ethernet wired in, so mesh devices would have to be wirelessly connected.<p>I'm open to Unifi and have helped with some corporate installs of it, but I am concerned it may be too much for my needs.<p>What works well for you?
In a sea of recommendations for Mikrotik, TP-Link, UniFi, etc. -- all routers I was looking at getting myself -- I'm hesitant to share the blissful state of <a href="https://firewalla.com" rel="nofollow">https://firewalla.com</a><p>I had crossed the bridge of being tired of configuring OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc. over the years. I just wanted something that worked reliably and was intuitive to both setup and manage.<p>With the Firewalla Purple and their iOS app, I've never seen such good UI/UX in a networking product, and it's been a great experience (I recommend the Purple or the Gold).
Mikrotik hap ax3 seems to fill all your requirements at a good price
<a href="https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ax3" rel="nofollow">https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ax3</a><p>It's not open wrt but their routerOS is very open.
Is it a hard requirement to handle wifi as well as WAN routing in one box? If not, I can recommend OPNsense from personal use for a couple of years now. I bought an inexpensive fanless mini-pc from Amazon maybe 10 years ago, and started out with pfsense. When pfsense broke bad I switched to OPNsense and I haven't looked back.<p>I use a separate AP for wireless access, so that can be much dumber since most of the smarts sit in OPNsense.<p>The main reason I went this direction initially was that most consumer-grade all in one routers were not well-equipped to take advantage of a gigabit synchronous connection, so I wanted something beefier.
UniFi Dream Machine has been the best router I have ever owned by a mile. It just works and saves a lot of headaches.<p>If you truly don’t care, I would just get whatever router your ISP gives you.
I'm pretty happy with a x86 openwrt router:<p><a href="https://teklager.se/en/products/routers/apu2e5-open-source-router" rel="nofollow">https://teklager.se/en/products/routers/apu2e5-open-source-r...</a>
I did some research on a new router late last year, when I was specifically looking to switch to OpenWRT. I found a lot of recommendations for the TP-Link AC1900[1]. I bought one, installed OpenWRT, and it's been basically perfect so far.<p>I'm sure there are other good options, possibly even better ones. But this thing works a treat so far.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NF3K74H/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NF3K74H/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...</a>
The Turris Omnia is a good option, though perhaps not for the prices I see listed today (I paid $150 a year or two ago). Runs a customized (still open source) version of OpenWrt by default, but you can load anything you want on it - it's basically just a small Linux box with WiFi antennas (and some other nice-to-haves like an SFP port, mPCIe slots, etc...). I used their official kit to upgrade from AC to AX, but you can also DIY if you were to purchase the older AC version of the router.<p>Link - <a href="https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/" rel="nofollow">https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/</a>
Copied from another comment[0]<p>I used to have a lot of complicated setups that used static IPs, DSL connections with an ISP that supported MLPPP which I used Tomato firmware with VPN and QoS configs.<p>Now networking is pretty good using stock ISP provided modem/router and I added Netgear mesh base station and 2 satellites. The satellites have an Ethernet port which I use for the gaming PC-that's all that I need. Considered a PiHole but uBlock origin is good enough.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283266" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283266</a>
A PC Engines board [1] running OpenBSD would be my preference, but at present it doesn't have the horsepower to route a gigabit of traffic on this OS. A worthy tradeoff, IMO, but others may disagree. Can run Linux or OPNsense [2], too, on these headless boxes.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.pcengines.ch/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcengines.ch/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://opnsense.org/" rel="nofollow">https://opnsense.org/</a>
I was so impressed by Synology's NAS products that I decided to checkout their routers when <i>finally</i> upgrading from my Apple Airport this year.<p>I went with the WRX560 and so far I'm really happy with it.<p>The SRM software is on par with the NAS DSM software, which is to say its easy to use and looks great.<p>I created several wifi networks, including one just for home IOT stuffs, and even assigned one of the back ethernet ports to same network for my wired IOT devices.<p>So far I'm happy ...