[alyandon]

Usually, anything you can install a third party firmware on like openwrt, dd-wrt or tomato (shibby's version of tomato is the one I used the most).

However, I gave up on consumer hardware and went with Ubiquiti for wifi AP and Mikrotik as my router. It was a bit of a pain to set up all my NAT rules in the Mikrotik router because unfortunately consumer devices do a lot of extra work behind that scenes (like setting up NAT reflection) to facilitate having NAT work painlessly. I'm perfectly content with the end result now though.

[a012]

Opposite on me, I'm having a Mikrotik hAp ac and considering to use it as AP only then buy a Ubiquiti ER-X in front of it.

[alyandon]

I did consider going with a pure Ubiquti solution but after borrowing a friends ER-Lite and comparing it to running RouterOS in a VM I decided that Mikrotik was a better overall fit for me from a technical standpoint. The RB3011 having a powerful cpu + the integrated 10 port (actually two different switches) switch helped push me that direction.

There was something almost zen-like watching 300Mbps of traffic transiting my RB3011 and seeing it utilize 6% cpu.

Ultimately, either is a fine solution and an ER-X is going to be a lot less fiddly to setup.

[swinglock]

I would stay away from Ubnt routing. Which features that requires disabling packet processing off-loads and the performance impact is not well documented and varies between models and software versions.

There appears to be many bugs related to off-loading as well. The below example is what finally made me decide not to consider Ubnt routers. It may be fixed now, maybe, but even if it was broken for way too long and shrouded in too much mystery, not even making it obvious which models are effected (the thread title was not always that specific either). I can't take Ubnt seriously, even for a home environment, after seeing how basic forwarding is that poor and it's not even their highest priority.

The only good thing that this proves is that at least they don't censor their forums, trying to hide issues.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/UDP-packet-loss-on-Cav...

[Wheaties466]

I'll never move on from a mikrotik router and UBNT wireless.

also mikrotik routers comes with a standard config that comes with NAT w/ masquerade pre configured. But I agree there is a TON that is done behind the scenes. That level of granularity is what I am looking for.

[justsomedood]

I'm in the exact same scenario. Mikrotik Router and a Ubiquiti API. I do have an older 2011, the 3011's are much faster.

The 3rd party firmwares aren't as powerful as mikrotik's RouterOS, and the Mikrotik hardware is really pretty cheap - though the UI is pretty bad for it. They're great once you get used to the UI