Hello everyone,
worked with (though easy to use, they are often not).
Are there products that route better? sure. There are also things that do better QoS. Some products are more stable, and others easier to use. There is always someone that does something better. Mikrotik’s advantage is it does a wide variety of things well, and it does it at a very low comparative cost.
The down side is that low price comes at the cost of official support and sometimes stability of new ROS releases. If you need complete vendor support without a contractor or aren’t comfortable working through community forums and wikis, they might not be the right fit for you
With all that said, for the price point, I still love Mikrotik. I run one at home. I use them for Bandwidth Shaping at work. One lives in my tech bag to help with on-site troubleshooting. They are great little devices.
As routers, like you said, their benefit comes in flexibility and price. Any model can do just about anything, i.e. tiny little $40 routers doing OSPF, BGP, MPLS etc. Once you know RouterOS you can do a lot.
YOu just have to be more mindful of your updates, a bit more overhead in management and change control to make sure your not pushing out a bad update, but the price far outweighs the time - I could of got a SINGLE Cisco ASR a few years ago for about $10k (AUD), or I could get multiple CCR1036’s for <$5k. I’d have spare hardware and more redundancy.
Every solution in the world has a sacrifice - even if that sacrifice is cost. But even then, the very big expensive brands will often release a buggy update or have non-functioning features.