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Ubiquiti EdgeRouter vs MikroTik

Wed Jun 22, 2022 3:34 am

I would like to share my experience working with Ubiquiti EdgeOS and MikroTik RouterOS. Maybe it will help someone thinking about switching to MikroTik. The two devices I had experience with are EdgeRouter X and hAP ac2. I don't use MikroTik wireless, so can't comment on that. I used both platforms only in SOHO environments.

In December 2021 a friend of mine asked me to set up a site-to-site VPN between his house and two other locations, plus ~20 road warrior VPN clients. At the time I had been using EdgeRouter X for about 5 years without any issues. I had a number of custom configurations there (meaning outside of EdgeOS) like WireGuard and was planning to use the same familiar devices for this request. However, I soon realized ER-X was out of stock everywhere (still is up to this day). There were some used offerings for 2-3 times the cost of the new one; not very enticing prospective.

I started to look for the alternative. MikroTik came up in many recommendation even 5 years ago when I was switching away from Tomato. It was coming up again this time. The learning curve warnings didn't really scare me as I have a technical degree in networking and an expired CCNA. Although as with any new system I realized some time had to be invested. Which is why I wanted to chose a good solution that I can stick with for years to come. When I saw RouterOS supported WireGuard natively (it was in December 2021 when ROS 7 just came out), I decided to give it a try. I also needed dynamic DNS as both site had dynamic IP from ISP. There are plenty of options for DDNS out there, but MikroTik has its own built-in service - even easier for my purposes, no need to register any accounts.

After getting familiar with RouterOS and deploying three hAP ac2's for my friend, I liked it so much that decided to replace ER-X with hAP ac2 as my main home router. While I was happy with ER-X, I had been wanting to have a spare, and ER-X was nowhere to be found. The whole situation around EdgeRouter series was not clear (still isn't), it looked abandoned. I had been telling myself I needed a dependable solution. I must add that I never upgraded my ER-X to 2.x version of EdgeOS since there were many reported issues with features I used. And 1.x was rock solid for me all these years. These considerations combined with everything RouterOS is generally liked for (Winbox being not the last thing) made the switch easy. I was able to reproduce 99% of my configuration while improving a lot of things and adding things I could never have in EdgeOS..

Management interface
RouterOS is so much better in many UI aspects. Winbox is a really powerful and convenient tool. I don't know why some people complain about its looks. I personally value functionality and usability above all else in any user interface. Winbox with its responsiveness, low-level details, ability to have many windows side by side beats any Web UI.

RouterOS CLI is better as well. Ability to enter into a submenu and then just run shorter commands; syntax highlighting. The best part is that you can seamlessly switch between GUI and CLI, run a command and immediately see changes in Winbox. If you read a command export, you already know how to do it in GUI (some menus are named differently, but usually easy to figure out). It's just all coherent.

In EdgeOS Web UI is disjointed from CLI. You can't use both together - try entering a command and Web UI tells you to reload. Web UI doesn't have many features CLI offers (config tree doesn't count, it's just a poor frontend to CLI, no autocomplete there). The UI itself puts noticeable load on CPU. While I rarely use RouterOS web UI (I see no point when Winbox is so great), I still like it a lot better than EdgeOS.

Overall, configuration management in RouterOS is well thought-out, it just shows it was designed by people using it, not by designers chasing a pretty UI. There are so many little useful things that really make a difference. The ability to comment almost every configuration item. The option to disable/enable almost every configuration item without removing (one of my favorite features). Safe mode saved me more than once.

Monitoring
Long time ago when I was using Tomato, I found various graphs very useful. When I switched to EdgeOS, it was one of the features I really missed. Over time I got used to not having any decent traffic monitoring on EdgeOS. It does have a basic graph and even a sort of DPI, but in practice it wasn't very helpful in many troubleshooting scenarios. The worse part is with enabled NAT hardware offload the traffic counters are not accurate. So you can't get even such a basic thing as total amount of traffic that passed your WAN interface, for example.

Traffic graphs in Winbox are awesome. You can have many windows opened side by side, a graph for any interface (virtual or logical), even a graph for any firewall rule. A nice feature I recently discovered: when you add a monitor under kid-control, you immediately get traffic monitoring (no graphs there) for each device. Really helpful when you are wondering who in the household is "eating" all the traffic.

Firewall
I like the firewall in RouterOS a lot more, it is more logical in my opinion since it's based on iptables/nftables which I'm very familiar with. EdgeOS also uses Linux-based firewall, but it forces a bunch of custom chains on you. For example, in order to block access to the router itself you have to create a bunch of rules to cover each interface. Direct iptables allows to block everything with a single rule. I actually ended up using a lot of direct iptables rules with EdgeOS.
In RouterOS you get a nice graphical view for all rules, connection states, counters - all condensed in one place.

Miscellaneous
RouterOS is just full of various nice tools, some of which I still need to explore. Automatic email for certain log events; DHCP server shows what eth port is used by the client; Winbox MAC connectivity that allows you to connect to the router without any IP connectivity; torch.

RouterOS weaknesses
DNS server is rather limited compared to dnsmasq, although covers most usual scenarios.

DoH is pretty slow and has some limitations. That's actually one feature I stopped using. On ER-X I had been using dnscrypt-proxy for many years.

Lack of standard Linux tools. Some functionality is replaced, but other is missing. For example, I can't tell what is using RAM in RouterOS.

Scripting is sometimes lacking what seems to be very basic things available in any shell. But it is quite powerful in other aspects like dealing with IP addresses. Still, I would take even the most basic Linux shell over proprietary scripting language any day.

The main thing I'm missing from EdgeOS is not so much EdgeOS but the Linux itself. For me ER-X was like a little Debian Linux server with all the familiar commands, tools, bash. And the flexibility to add non-stock features like WireGuard, dnscrypt-proxy, a small web server and so on. After years on DD-WRT, then Tomato, then EdgeOS - where in each case I had the ability to install extra packages and use some sort of shell - RouterOS surely felt like a closed ecosystem. If Linux is not your cup of tea, this is probably irrelevant for you. Luckily, RouterOS has plenty of built-in features (but we always want more, don't we). And containers in the future version should address this shortcoming, although I'm not sure how much can be done on hAP ac2 due to low amount of RAM.


One last comment is about the hardware itself: while hAP ac2 is by no means ugly, I still like the classic rectangular metal ER-X much better. I would prefer the hEX style design. But it's not important, both routers have been very stable for me, so I rarely had to touch them or look at them.
 
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Re: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter vs MikroTik

Wed Jun 22, 2022 3:43 am

interesting, thank you for sharing
 
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Re: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter vs MikroTik

Wed Jun 22, 2022 4:39 am

With container support on 7.4 beta you could run real Linux OS on your MikroTik. On EdgeOS you are limited to schroot if you want to run software in somewhat isolated environment.
The biggest feature I find missing is hardware acceleration for IPv6 flows. Or any acceleration for IPv6 whatsoever. Another notable miss is lack of support for 802.1p tagged frames with no VID (which is an important feature for users of a major US ISP). On EdgeOS you could just create a VIF with VID 0 and you are set. On RouterOS you could receive 802.1p tagged frames if you add an interface to a bridge and accept all frames. If your switch supports just one L3HW bridge, you lose hw acceleration in process. However whatever you do, you cannot send 802.1p tagged frames without 802.1q VLAN!
 
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Lokamaya
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Re: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter vs MikroTik

Mon Mar 18, 2024 1:24 am

Interesting. Thank you.

I just home and office user with small network. Never touch EdgeRouter, but quite familiar with EdgeSwitch (and SwOS). Once I had an USG, but now I prefer Mikrotik.

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