[h4kunamata]

MikroTik is a nightmare from what I have heard, companies who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot wait for the contract to expire to replace everything.

For homelab, you are far better served buying a second hand Sophos baremetal/server rack mounted, and installing OPNSense in it.

I have a 2nd hand Sophos SG210 Rev3 from eBay, replaced the Celeron CPU with an i7 one, 16GB, new SSD, dual 10G NIC, it had been running like a dream.

[AndroTux]

> cannot wait for the contract to expire

There is no contract with MikroTik. You buy the hardware, that's it. The software and updates are free.

[alt227]

Assuming OP is meaning the ISP contract they are in which requires them to use the ISP provided Microtik router.

[sdsdssweew213]

Another option is to just buy some used enterprise mini PC (google project tinyminimicro) with PCIE slot, and use that. Probably lower power consumption than a full rack mounted server, definitely takes much less space (unless you already have the rack).

[bloqs]

Power consumption?