I think these things (GL.iNet home/travel routers and Ubiquiti routers/access points) are pretty clearly a different market, though. I say this with a lot of tech purchases (cameras, computers, and yes, routers, etc.), but if you don’t know why you need a $300 router, you probably don’t need a $300 router.
But a bigger issue here is that even with fairly high-end consumer wireless gear (e.g., an ASUS RT-AXE7800) you are not going to get substantially higher throughput on a real-world basis with real wireless clients compared to a more moderately priced router. In general, getting anything over 500-600mbps over a wireless setup per-client is fantastic. As we’ve discussed with regard to travel router specs, it doesn’t matter if you can push 550mbps of Wireguard traffic if the “enhanced internet” at the hotels you stay at maxes out at 50mbps. Or if you can only get 350mbps from the wireless link between your computer and router. Just because you have a product with higher theoretical or laboratory performance doesn’t mean it’s going to actually be faster in the real world.
From an actual usability perspective, things like stability, signal strength, longevity of software support, etc. are far more important than raw horsepower. While trying not to be critical of GL.iNet, I think the last few years show how easy it is to prioritize things that look good at the expense of things that matter more. Devices like the AR750S (Slate) didn’t have all of the horsepower or features that GL.iNet has layered onto the AXT1800 (Slate AX), but it was small, light, and more importantly mostly bug-free. While I appreciate the brute force of the Slate AX, I think it’s fair to say that the firmware releases of recent GL.iNet products have been hit or miss at best. And again, to my point in the previous paragraph, the original Slate is still powerful enough to keep up with most internet connections at hotels in the US.
My general feel is that the new 4.X UX is nice for people who maybe aren’t as technically sophisticated who want to use some more advanced features. But for my purposes it often gets in the way of what I’d actually like to do. But I also get that I’m not the typical user. One of the challenges with the 4.X UX is that it’s trying to cram all of the features you could possibly want in any scenario into a single software interface, rather than splitting some of those out. It turns out that you don’t need the same things when you’re using a device as a travel router that you do when you’re using it as a home router. I don’t need to forward ports or have multi-wan failover or advanced bandwidth monitoring when I’m in a hotel. I do need those things at home (sidenote - how many people here actually have two redundant internet connections at your house? I can’t think there are that many of us). My personal preference would be for GL.iNet to seriously slim down the travel router UX to the functions that matter - connecting to a network, logging in to the captive portal, making sure the VPN comes up as soon as real internet is detected - such that they are bulletproof for users with little or no technical ability (i.e., my parents); then build a separate UX containing all of the goodies home/SOHO users might want in a separate package.
This is case of 4 x LAN ports meeting your specific requirements, but not my specific requirements. I have gone through a number of 4-port routers over ~25 years and adding switches is precisely what I no longer want (I still have 4 switches on the shelf), what with additional power adapters, cables and points of failure. The RT-AX88U shows the Client name, IP, MAC connected to each LAN port and allows to turn on/off with a click on a single web UI. An additional managed switch would be expensive and require logging into a separate web UI.
I actually do not use the wifi on the RT-AX88U and use it as a wired edge router/firewall. For wifi, I use meshed Unifi U6-Pro and UAP-AC-M access points and am able achieve ~800Mbps download on a Samsung Wifi 6 2x2 smartphone and ~700Mbps download on an HP Wifi 6 2x2 mini-desktop PC, which is close enough for me to LAN port speeds without having to run cables. The Unifi Network Controller shows both access points and all the wifi client information and allows to block with a click on a single web UI. When I eventually decide to replace the RT-AX88U, I will definitely consider a Unifi router/firewall that I would manage without logging into a separate web UI.
Whether the Asus and Unifi equipment are worth their prices is up to each individual, so your mileage may vary. As I stated, for me personally, they are worth every penny to simplify management and not having to deal with bugs and issues. In my opinion, the cost of my network infrastructure is small relative to the what I have already spent and what I will continue to spend on the hardware/software/maintenance of all the devices that rely on the network. Throughput is not the only, nor most important factor in my decisions.
I do not have a Flint, so I do not know its features. There was a comment by motox22a about having the flexibility through the GL.iNet interface to assign LAN Ports as WAN ports for failover/fallback, which the RT-AX88U web UI currently has.
GL.iNet devices still have their specific uses for me. I currently have 4 GL.iNet routers, with 1 more on the way and after I gave 1 to my son.
Did anyone say Mikrotik hAP ax³. Don’t actual have one but doing reading on specs I have started to want one. Not sure on the price and is newest AX model is not available in the USA yet.
I’ve bought close to 1,000 Mikrotik routers for work and tbh their failure rate is high enough that I wouldn’t consider one for personal use (and we are redesigning the system to avoid using them in the future). I don’t have exact numbers in front of me, but we’re talking failure rates of 5+% over a 3-5 year period. Some (of the failed devices) are in environmentally harsh conditions, but most are not.
Which… to raise a larger point, I can’t speak to GL-iNet’s customer base, but I can say pretty confidently with Mikrotik that the loudest complainers about features in the forums who say, e.g., “I would have bought X product, but it doesn’t have (e.g.) Wireguard performance of 650mbps!” are categorically not the people who drive actual sales. Those people are likely to buy a single device every couple of years. For the moment, I’m buying hundreds of devices a year, and that still makes me an insignificant player compared to the WISP market where people buy thousands or tens of thousands per year.
It depends. For some things it’s quite good, for others not as much. They have iterated quickly on version 7, which has added a lot of features, but you’re still dealing with a lot of the historical jank they are famous for.
For our particular application we’ve been able to live with the limitations, but others might find them restrictive. My bigger concern are the number of random critical security vulns that crop up from time to time which are harder to patch on a production device. Not as big of a deal for a home user.
If you can live with the closed source nature of their platform and the feature set does what you want it to, they offer a relatively good hardware package at a reasonable price point (again, discounting the failure rates I’ve experienced).
