RB4011

The router would need to be capable of Policy Based Routing, I use MikroTik but there are many others.

After a power-related "incident" damaged our last router, our ISP replaced it with the cheapest router they could find, which performs poorly, offers basically no options, and is owned by the ISP. I've been eyeing Mikrotik routers for a few years now, mainly because of RouterOS offering a decent featureset and apparently the hardware functionality being decent value for the price. Given my situation, now is probably the right time. While I know the learning curve can be very sharp, I do a lot of tinkering and am wrapping up an IT degree so I don't think that will be an issue. I'd like to be able to do some homelabbing eventually but money's tight and hardware is expensive these days so my needs are just the router/WAP for now. I don't mind doing a non-wifi router but I would have to factor the separate WAP into the costs in that case. I need a pretty strong signal to reach a particular corner of the house (something about the layout of the walls tends to make wifi signals really fall off there). I've been told Mikrotik's wifi is not great, so I'd probably look elsewhere for that if it comes down to it. A lot of WAPs seem to rely on PoE so having that from the router would be nice. Main ones I've been looking at are the L009UiGS-RM, the hEX S 2025, and the hAP ax3. The hAP ax3 *seems* the most performant of the three but I don't know how it fares in practice. There's also the concern about built-in wifi performance. Of the other two, the hEX S 2025 seems to have better throughput performance but I've seen comments that the L009UiGS-RM tends to run better in practice. Recommendations? --- EDIT: Uplink is around 600Mbps under ideal circumstances (no other devices on, direct eth to the ISP modem). ISP modem only has two ethernet connections, no SFP/SFP+. Budget is around 200-250 USD total; this includes a separately purchased WAP if needed.

Mikrotik is the one to scratch that itch.

They have a GUI. Simplicity? Not really. You have to configure everything manually. In fact the default config is literally blank until you run through the wizard, and even that is like one DHCP server, a WAN, and basic firewall. But much like openwrt, you can configure EVERYTHING from the CLI or the GUI. And in fact a configuration backup is just the text file of the CLI commands to import. But I don't think you can hand edit their config files like openwrt. You can download the OS and play with it in a VM. Edit: for example, want a VLAN network in UniFi? Click a button. In mikrotik you need to create a DHCP pool, create a DHCP server, create the VLAN tag, create the network and link all the parts together. Oh firewall? Need to make all those rules up to. For better or worse it won't do a single thing that you don't configure.