[mavrc]

I know others have recommended this already, but I would also say that your best bet is to buy some Ubiquiti hardware. An EdgeRouter X + UniFI Pro dual-band AP is on the order of $200 from Amazon and has way, way better functionality than SOHO hardware of same price point, with the principal issue that it is enterprise hardware, and is very much not point-and-click to set up. I think the tradeoff in functionality and build quality is worth it, though.

I recently replaced my PC router running pfSense with an EdgeRouter X - at ~$50 the power savings alone will probably pay for it in less than a year, and the only thing I can't do with it that I could do with pfSense is create a standalone OpenVPN endpoint - so I'm moving that functionality to a server that was running anyway.

[skrowl]

Don't leave out Mikrotik hardware from the mix. Mikrotik routers are much better than consumer-grade things you buy at Best Buy and provide advanced features.

[rbritton]

I can second this. I recently upgraded my home network to an EdgeRouter PoE + Netgear R7000 (flashed to DD-WRT) and wish I would've gone with Ubiquiti across the board. That side of things was much, much easier to get configured how I wanted it than DD-WRT on the Netgear. The VLAN tagging in DD-WRT for that hardware only partially worked via the GUI configuration, and I ended up having to go in via the CLI to finish it off.

[tlow]

Pretty far out of my depth here, but I did the same w/ 3 Long Range Dual Band Pro APs and I'm quite pleased... so thirded.

[ac29]

One huge plus of the EdgeRouters and EdgeOS (a Vyatta fork) is that they have a Debian base. Just about any package you need is an `apt install` away. There really isn't any competition that lets you do that on a $50-100 platform that runs on a few watts.

>the only thing I can't do with it that I could do with pfSense is create a standalone OpenVPN endpoint

Pretty sure you can do this, check the forums.

[TwoNineFive]

+1 Not just a Debian base. When you SSH into them, they drop you right into a bash shell! Surprisingly open in that respect. I hear there have been some GPL disputes when it comes to source code though.

[dawnerd]

Their recent firmware has made it pretty plug and play. Edge router has a nice wizard for setting up basic routing and the AC pro can be setup via their UniFi phone app. Shouldn't take you any longer than an hour to be fully setup.

[tlow]

This was a really nice experience. Just went through this as a total novice -- never setup these APs and I'm not super knowledgeable in this area, but setup was really easy via a nice iOS app. Important configuration options were all available and all 3 APs I'm running are using the same SSID with no problems.