Hello i work on a ISP and we are choosing equipment. We were working for the las 6 months with Mikro and we really love it. But we have the doubt. Wich are the advantages and disadvantages of use mikrotik insted of Cisco. Or in which cases we should use one or other. I would like to know from your expirience point of view.


Best regards.

I've used Cisco for years and when we came across Mikrotik it really was a no-brainer for us. The tools available in the interface alone made it worth switching and we've found that deployments are quicker too thanks to the simplicity of the interface. Just because Cisco is a big name doesn't mean that they're still the best.

We are a big Cisco user, but we decided to try the MikroTik CCR1036-12G-4S-EM routers and are really impressed with them.
They are knocking spots off the cisco kit in terms of performance and features.

We have written a script that you can use for BGP to get the neighbor information out in the same way as you can do on the Cisco kit.
http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=79861

We have also written some graphs for Cacti so you can monitor the CPU, BGP Routes an Memory on the devices.
http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=79863

We are really impressed with the MikroTik equipment and would recommend it to anyone who is thinking of buying Cisco. It is a pity they don't do redundant power supply models yet, but I hope they will come.
As far as support has told us they are working on the Multi-Core support for various processes like BGP, OSPF and SNMP so the equipment can make use of the 36 core processor that the CCR1036 has in them. Cisco processors have been quite weak and struggle when you get a few BGP peers flapping, but so far the MikroTik routers we are using have been really good and they are great value for money.
We still use Cisco in our core, but that is mainly because the big chassis switches and routers have enough ports for our requirements.

Kind regards,
Marc

One big positive for us when we transitioned away from the Cisco gear was how cheaply we could build a POC network.What would have cost us usually 10-15k USD would cost us maybe 1k with the Mikrotik gear.There are certain areas where the Cisco's are just untouchable like throughput performance on their top end devices,multi layer switches,top notch support etc.

Some shortcomings on the MTK are their logical (VRRP is a joke) and physical redundancy (No redundant PSU) . Bad QA is unfortunately part and parcel of the MTK experience.


As the 6.XX platform matures and optimizations are made to properly optimize all those cores, the CCR platform will really look attractive in the coming years.

Comparing Mikrotik and Cisco is like comparing Chrysler 300 with Rolls-Royce Phantom. Clearly the 2nd one is way better, question is if it is feasible and affordable for you.

Mikrotik's advantages:
1) Price
2) Very extensive scripting capabilities that allow you to get some extra functionality without having to wait for developers to implement it.

Cisco's advantages:
1) TAC (if you are going to pay for it) where you can get an excellent engineer on the phone to help you with your issue (yes, you may have to talk to a manager to get to the engineer, but at least you can get there)
2) Enormous amounts of information on any topic.
3) Support from majority of the tools (i.e. netflow analyzers may come with neat pre-made reports for you)
4) You will be able to easily hire a new network engineer who knows Cisco. Good luck finding a network engineer who even heard of Mikrotik.
5) Name. You will be able to tell your customers that you are running on Cisco devices, some will like it a lot.

Mikrotik's disadvantages:
1) By far the biggest issue with Mikrotik is lack of good ways to troubleshoot/monitor many issues. A simple example - I am running EOIP tunnel over L2TP/IPSEC. Guess what happens with the status of EOIP tunnel if I manually disable the L2TP tunnel? Answer is - NOTHING! It will keep showing to you that it is up and running, it will even show trying to send some data through it. Of course the tunnel is down, but you can't see that. So I am very interested how I will be able to monitor this tunnel, as I am planning to use it as a backup to my main wireless link. So far I can only think of writing a script that will log in to one of the end devices (non-Mikrotiks) and will check for cdp neighbors and will alert me if there's no other end device in that list. Maybe there are better options, but they are far from obvious.

2) Some of the functionality is not quite there. For example, I still didn't figure out a way to create an L2TP/IPSEC tunnel that would work for both Mac and iPhone. There's one setting difference and I wasn't able to find a way to have the same profile for both connections. I am not saying Cisco doesn't have similar issues, but most of the times there are known and very well documented work-arounds for the issue.

Cisco's disadvantages:
1) Price. They are expensive, especially with support. The only way to get reasonable prices from them is to run network 50% Cisco and 50% something else - in that case, especially if your company is big, Cisco will give up to 70% discount.
2) Lots of proprietary technologies. OTV and FabricPath are cool and work very well, but if you implement them - you have to stick to Cisco, can't go to other vendors.

So with all that being said, if you are having a large network with some kind of uptime requirement and you have money - go with Cisco. If you don't care about your uptime, or your network is very small (hence easy to troubleshoot) - then you can choose Mikrotik, set it up and hope that it never goes wrong.

I was the person who made this topic like one year ago.

I have to admint that at the first time i was not so convice to use it because i had been trained on Cisco. Right now after one year, i am talking to other persons how good is it. I can tell you that i have take Mikrotik up to limit having 98 % of usage. After more than one year of ussage i can't be more in love with this devices. I got 2 certifications and i will get more. I talk with cisco people tell them what can i do and they can't belive it.

It is more difficult than use Cisco because is not as documente as it. But with those prices you can get 2 or 3 mikrotik just to setup a laboratory. The important part is that all feature are enable also on smaller devices.

Hi All,

I beg to differ.

Cisco are cool kits because they have an easier adoption criteria. You know the usual Microsoft kind of a guy trying to learn networking. They offer the academics of network.
Mikrotik on the other hand is a Middle to UP of the pyramid kind of kit. Requires knowledge of Linux and a level of network skills to really gather up what to do with the various *nix packages that assemble in the elegant Mikrotik kit.
We have done 400days uptime with this Mikrotik kit, so the issue of using it for POC rather than production stuff gets poked right in the heart.
See this: http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Solar_Power_HOWTO

On another note, we have used CCRs which are the answer to the bulky, power hungry, loud Cisco carrier grade routers. Result has been superb.

Cisco speak' reminds one of boring school homework. Too many acronmys, and long words to describe simplistic concepts. SVI, anyone!

I have listened to http://packetpushers.net which is a good hangout for Cisco crew. Its made up of top tier techies. And at this level, the various concepts they describe can be implemented head to head with Mikrotiks.

I dare say if we classified Cisco to Mikrotiks, Ciscos would be the mass production white box cars we see on the road. Mikrotiks have a soul. Its the kit they hand you when you want to just go for the jugular. To be used on Maserati like workshop

Vincent I can't agree.

I love the MTK stuff but it just isn't in the same league as our Cisco or Juniper equipment we use.
You run into walls with the CCR's when you do high speed IPSEC transfers and limitations like the 1GB per flow on the 10GB models is pretty infuriating.The OSPF/BGP on the Mikrotiks are buggy as all heck and hasn't been attended to since the 4.XX days.

The OSPF/BGP on the Mikrotiks are buggy as all heck and hasn't been attended to since the 4.XX days.

They have been developing "new routing" since early 5.x times, this will make its way in to v7, and hopefully resolve all the problems.

its not easy writing a new routing stack...

What kind of problems do you have. I have a bgp session running OK mikro since 2013 and is working perfect

Vincent I can't agree.
I love the MTK stuff but it just isn't in the same league as our Cisco or Juniper equipment we use.
You run into walls with the CCR's when you do high speed IPSEC transfers and limitations like the 1GB per flow on the 10GB models is pretty infuriating.The OSPF/BGP on the Mikrotiks are buggy as all heck and hasn't been attended to since the 4.XX days.

Definitely 100% true. I love Mikrotik as well, but there are some spheres of operation where a Mikrotik is just a toy compared with the much more robust gear on the network. (sorry - it's just true - again, I'm a huge fan of Mikrotik so don't take this as a bashing post)

What kind of problems do you have. I have a bgp session running OK mikro since 2013 and is working perfect

Routing is definitely buggy and subtly broken on Mikrotik. One glaring example is that default route origination in OSPF doesn't allow floating static backup and it interferes with policy routing from BGP. I spent a few hours comparing simple topologies with Cisco vs. Mikrotik, and Mikrotik consistently exhibits subtle flaws that result in sub-optimal routing or even broken behavior such as routing loops, or backup default GWs that can only be released manually.

For instance, when doing a conditional default-originate in OSPF, a route with administrative distance > 110 will not go inactive if OSPF learns some other default GW.

Suppose you have R1 and R2 both originating default routes into OSPF if-installed-type-2, with R1 metric=1 and R2 metric=2. R1 has a static default GW with ping tests, and R2 has a floating static backup default route. The idea is that if R1's connection goes down, it withdraws its default route advertisement from OSPF and R2's floating static route takes over. R2 now announces the default route based on this floating static route. The problem is that when R1's connection is fixed, OSPF should automatically revert to using R1 as the global default route.

Mikrotik won't do it - even though R2's floating static route has a distance > 110, it won't drop that in favor of the restored default GW announcement from R1 (which would have a distance of 110). This is because the OSPF process completely ignores default routes in the OSPF database while the local router is announcing default GW into OSPF even if this announcement is based on a route that is "worse" than OSPF. This is incorrect behavior. If a better default route is available via OSPF, then the router should withdraw its own advertisement from OSPF in favor of the superior route.

This is a classic configuration that is a no-brainer to implement in Cisco, Adtran, Juniper, etc - yet is broken in ROS.

It causes similar problems when using BGP for the default route if you want active/backup behavior (and iBGP is ALSO bugged in a way that breaks this option).

In ROS, iBGP won't advertise the default GW prefix learned from eBGP. Instead, you must originate a new default route into iBGP which is a bad thing to do - it can lead to routing loops. It's a very subtly different thing to re-originate a default GW into iBGP than to propagate a route from eBGP.

It's also slow and clunky to work with a large routing table in ROS (apparently this is fixed in v7)

New versions of software tend to introduce bugs or re-introduce old bugs.

Basically, Mikrotik is a wonderfully flexible and capable platform that allows advanced users the ability to cheaply do almost anything network-related that they can imagine. However, it has not reached the robustness level of the well-known carrier-grade gear out there.

Hi
I'm Mikrotik International Consultant and have been using Mikrotik devices for about 6 years and from that time nothing is wrong with the devices. I am using most of network stuff like OSPF, IP Tunnel, Queues, Firewall, NAT, etc and all of them are working properly. I firmly believe that with the comparison of price and stability, the number one choice is absolutely Mikrotik.

@kerberos2023

Your post sounds like an infomercial and has no basis in facts.. Zerobyte clearly laid out how OSPF is flawed and provided examples and yet your opinion is that it is fine.
Suggest you edit/delete your post or actually provide refuting evidence.