HACKER Q&A
📣 AuthorizedCust

What's a good home router?


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.

I'm having a lot of trouble wading through options. Finding a good price-to-performance ratio is hard.

I'd prefer to future proof with AX. I'd like robust features that include VPN, parental control, reporting, and more.

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.)

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.

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.

What works well for you?

  👤 harrydehal Accepted Answer ✓
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 https://firewalla.com

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.

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).

👤 msh
Mikrotik hap ax3 seems to fill all your requirements at a good price https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ax3

It's not open wrt but their routerOS is very open.

👤 bigjimmyk3
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.

I use a separate AP for wireless access, so that can be much dumber since most of the smarts sit in OPNsense.

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.

👤 softwaredoug
UniFi Dream Machine has been the best router I have ever owned by a mile. It just works and saves a lot of headaches.

If you truly don’t care, I would just get whatever router your ISP gives you.

👤 adriancr
I'm pretty happy with a x86 openwrt router:

https://teklager.se/en/products/routers/apu2e5-open-source-r...

👤 mindcrime
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.

I'm sure there are other good options, possibly even better ones. But this thing works a treat so far.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NF3K74H/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

👤 anemoiac
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.

Link - https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/

👤 karmakaze
Copied from another comment[0]

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.

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283266

👤 _0xdd
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.

[1] https://www.pcengines.ch/

[2] https://opnsense.org/

👤 davidpfarrell
I was so impressed by Synology's NAS products that I decided to checkout their routers when finally upgrading from my Apple Airport this year.

I went with the WRX560 and so far I'm really happy with it.

The SRM software is on par with the NAS DSM software, which is to say its easy to use and looks great.

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.

So far I'm happy ...

👤 cvalka
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt-as-...
👤 aborsy
OPNSense running on a mini pc, with a separate AP for WiFi. OpenWRT is good too.
👤 atmosx
anything that runs openwrt :-)