I love MikroTik. Do i find it easy to use? No. I am no sys admin, no network guru… But my home network works, wife is happy and I can still play with it in my homelab, improve mu home network and learn.
Can MikroTik improve? Yes. Do they suck? No!
I tend to agree with @tombs.
I see MT stuff as a cross-over between serious stuff (e.g. cisco) and cheap home-rated stuff (e.g. Dlink), which takes good things from each of worlds.
Do I use it at home? Yes, absolutely, and I’m happy with feature set and prices.
Would I use it in corporate environment NOW? Hell no.
Would I use it in corporate environment in the future? Gladly if it evolves.
Will I abandon MT for home use if it doesn’t evolve? Most likely no.
Yes, MT is currently in a niche. Should they evolve and overgrow the current niche? Only if they (devs and management alike) feel comfortable doing it. I’d hate to see them stretch into a new segment … fail miserably and take the current ecosystem into failure as well.
There is a lot of truth in what G00dm4n says.
I have read this post a few weeks ago, searching for new stuff about my new router. To be honest, the author is or was not at a very good level in his field. I started my Home Lab journey a few months ago using a basic isp router with zero settings. Since then, I temorary used an old PC as a pfsense but I didn’t like it that much, I was not learning anything with it too boring and simple.
Then I bought a MikroTik router, was a bit shy for like 1 month and used it in default config but after that, my Network was running in like two days as I wanted, of course I needed some help here, it was not working 100% in a correct way but a lot of the points that the author couldn’t make it, I could just reading the documentation and some examples. I don’t feel it is terrible hard and I have zero experiente in networking. I know I learn very fast tech-stuff and that I have some Linux at home backround, but I don’t know if that helps is just that I feel already “at home” using RouterOS in like 10-12 days of using it.
My VLANS are working, my wifi are working, firewall does exactly what I want, all is segregated, L3 works. I managed to connect and configure my other switch also. If Tik would be that bad I don’t think personally I would be able to do that.
And guess what ? The journey, homelab + home networking made me really think about to embrace a role in a company being a system administrator and maybe even devops. I don’t know how It will be in a corporate network with Mikrotik devices but I think big companies will always use some strong firewall solutions that Mikrotik lacks. But even so, for routing it is a very good option, price it is excelent. For 150 EUR I do more than a guy with some expensive Ubiquiti stuff can do. I will for sure be more prepared to learn CISCO and others after dealing with MikroTik, and the community is nice, I like you guys.
Stay safe ! And don’t forget to offbridge one of ethernet ports haha.
I find a conflict between this
They just stay in the niche with no serious competition - small ISPs and CPEs
and the critique in the same post. Is there an objection to Mikrotik successfully identifying and exploiting a niche? What else is a business supposed to do, when they are unlikely to achieve world domination (and would probably go broke trying)?
Like @mihalk, I started with ‘some’ technical competence but little knowledge of network device configuration. I suspect from mihalk’s latter comments that I am also far older. Sure, I am still on the long learning curve not a Zen ROS master, yet (a brief count in my head) I have at least half a dozen different Mikrotik routers (and two switches) doing different jobs in my home and away. All but a couple of my MIkrotiks differ in non-trivial aspects of their configurations.
Analogous with the original concepts of Unix, Mikrotik devices are small, efficient tools configurable alone or in groups for almost any task that might arise in a home or small business. A far greater range of options is exposed, if you wish to use them, compared with most commercial or open source software that might be considered.
Quite a bit of the ‘Mikrotik sucks’ denigration seems to arise from people wanting Mikrotik to be something other than Mikrotik, the world domination theory, or else complaints about things that actually (mostly) work but could be more modern or better or work infallibly in any circumstance.
Curb the d***riding. MikroTik’s UI is plain unintuitive. Sure, i can do silly stuff like setup PPPoE or BGP on a box I paid 60 bucks for but when it takes forum searches and video tutorials to setup a plain NAT for a web server then it’s a problem. I actually, genuinely prefer writing configs for OpenWRT by hand with their docs open on another tab instead of whatever hoops RouterOS is asking me to jump through. KISS is thrown out the window with these damn things.
I actually, genuinely prefer writing configs for OpenWRT by hand with their docs open on another tab instead of whatever hoops RouterOS
It should be a guilty pleasure for you to post here, recomend to stay stick to: https://openwrt.org/
I’m sure that’s why a major vendor like Nokia took the time to review MikroTik’s syntax and structure as a case study when developing a new OS…because it’s unintuitive 
/s
I’ve been in network engineering since the 1990s and MikroTik has one of the better CLI formats out there which is followed almost always in the UI - a rarity among network vendors. Even after 15 years in the world of Cisco designing and building data centers and ISPs using the Cisco CLI, MikroTik was still a challenge to learn - but not because it sucked.
It’s different and takes some time to adjust if you’re coming from other vendors. Once you do though, it’s pretty well laid out.
well .. do not use advanced stuff then. 
no one forces you to use MT anyways i guess
and TBH it is - if one is familiar with cisco, juniper, vyos, etc… - really not that hard to use CLI on ROS
EVERY CLI has its own learning curve … i think that is just a fact.
To all of those who say why MikroTik doesn’t expand and introduce more enterprise features—do you really want MikroTik to become another Cisco? Of course, it’s very hard to turn a small company into a global beast on the market. Even Cisco might not have become what they become if they tried to do it now, when there is a lot of competition from multiple angles. In a way it’s easier to be a pioneer when you establish your own standards and blaze the trail.
The point is, if MT indeed turned heavily towards enterprise market (and became successful at it), they would become a different company. They wouldn’t bother dealing with $60-$500 devices for SOHO. And forget about perpetual licensing too. They would likely stop being what they are now and what draws so many people.
Sure, they have a niche market, but that is probably one reason why they are successful. They easily outcompete the likes of D-Link and Asus with more technical home users, while also outcompeting big boys in small-to-medium businesses thanks to the feature/cost ratio. They found their market, and there is nothing wrong to stay within it. Yes, a business always wants to grow, but there are several types of the growth: insatiable corporate greed, demanding forever expansion and acquisition; or normal stable healthy growth to sustain the business.
We also have to admit that MT does listen to its customers (sometimes 
). When I just found out about MT in 2021, everything I read online was that they are excellent for routing, bad for WiFi. And recently we saw a massive change in WiFi area with the new drivers. People also keep saying RouterOS is hard for newbies, and now they are trying to make it easier with smartphone apps. We also see how new features are constantly added to ROS 7. Example being mDNS repeater, people whined about it for so long (including me), and now it’s there.
On the subject of newbies though, I think MT could do better. The functionality is all there, it’s just a matter of creating a user-friendly front-end UI without taking away or changing anything else that’s already in ROS. Quick Set is a good start but only for very basic things. If one wants to get just a bit deeper like VLANs or SQM or even parental controls (that’s supposed to be easy, right?), now you have to open up the world of ROS complexity. Maybe MT could create a separate WinBox-like tool that would look and work more like UniFi controller. Like I said, the API and functionality is already there to do this. Smartphone apps is a good attempt at it, but still not powerful enough for more tech-savvy, and also apparently most new users don’t know the apps exist. MT should probably add a piece of paper with a QR code to link to the apps.
I also think they can do better hardware-wise. They produce so many nice devices, but so many of them have just one or two features that would otherwise make a perfect device. This has been talked about many times. It’s hard to believe MT doesn’t understand this, yet they keep doing it over and over.
Nah, we’re just asking for the mainstream core functionality to be present in MPLS, BGP and OSPF, and for it to actually work.
tl;dr; Do not confuse UI complexity for Domain complexity
Sorry, I am not buying the “skill issue” argument.
The UI suffering is just an unoptimised usage of brain bandwidth. I feel like I am spending brain capacity on finding UI elements, trying to reorder a column, finding a proper section instead of thinking about network entities.
Let’s take as an example Interface and Interface Lists. I want to create an Interface List with four Interfaces.
What I expect after using other non related software:
- Go to Interfaces tab
- Select each interface I need in a list using checkbox
- Click action “Group in list” or “Add to List”.
- Opens a modal with options.
- Select existing List
- Create new List
What it actually is:
There are 3 entities and TWO tabs:
- Interface - separate tab one
- Interface List - separate tab two
- Interface - Interface List mapping - table accessible by clicking an action Lists inside a Interface lists tab
So your actions should be following:
- Go to Interface Lists tab
- Click Lists action
- Click +New
- Fill the form
- Go back using action Close
- Click +New
- Fill the form adding one Interface to the Interface List
- Repeat 4 times
There are several clear problems here:
- It’s a wrapper around tables.
- There is an abstraction, but it adds more complication. Misplacement of elements. Actions switch/close tabs. Interface list tab represents a map, not a list itself
- Two places for actions - the top and right.
and so on. There is so much to unpack, but there is no point.
The solution
I hope for this MikroTik Devices Controller . But instead of making it in the basement, I would rather get the early feedback as fast as possible. Disclose it like “we may and will break your network” and let’s go.
me too, exactly the same.
i just like the way it works 
even it’s not the most intuitive device/os ever.