hAP ax³

If you're not gonna be leaving ports open or remoting in very often, then mikrotik's pretty good. My ax3's happily running pihole unbound container on the router.

No, I haven't touched it in like half a year, and back then I mostly used a mix of winbox/CLI for containers and  a VLAN. The router did force me to learn a bit more about networking and not give conflicting commands that will cause silent fails, but after that its been smooth running.  I'm using the mikrotik's back to home feature instead of tailscale. AFAIK its just a similar wireguars tunnel, with additional CGNAT support by connecting through mikrotik servers if needed. Does a Tailscale container have any advantage over this feature?

Same. Mikrotik punches way above its weight. Surprised they aren't more popular.

Wait for WiFi 7, if you need containers you need a USB stick so go for the ax3 in that case (the new ax s wouldn’t work as it’s 32 bits and most images are now built only for 64 bits). PD: I have the ax3 and works great running Adguard Home as a container.

Mikrotik didn't really offer anything I'd have considered a fully featured home router for a while (until the ax³ finally started shipping in volume), so if you didn't want to get something either totally overkill or totally anaemic you were outta luck with mikrotik.

I'd say a more appropiate comparison is MacOS to Linux. With mikrotik you have mostly all of Linux netfilter capabilities, a tool that can do whatever you want as long as you know what and how it is done. Whereas ( the few ) Uniquities I've seen are more like a canned product. But to be fair the last time I came across a Ubiquity Edgerouter was ... 10 years ago.

Yeah, I was also thinking about that. Maybe US, which I assume most of the people here are from there, is not its target market. I learnt about it some 20 years ago, in the 802.11g days, in a book called: ["Building wireless community networks"](https://archive.org/details/buildingwireless00flic), so it kinda points in the other direction, probably financially broken places and people like me, at Argentina. I was so incredibly all the things you could do with routerboard hardware and it even ran/runs in i386.

MikroTik HAP ac3 or ax3. Either one is good. It just depends on your budget. These are reliable routers.

MikroTik HAP ac3 or ax3. Either one is good. It just depends on your budget. These are reliable routers.

[MikroTik hAP ax³](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1872028-REG/mikrotik_c53uig_5hpaxd2hpaxd_us_hap_ax3_2_4_5ghz_wifi.html) It’s what I recommend to everyone. It’s a solid device that has great reliability.

Nope! It’s running full RouterOS.

To answer your questions and to add more ideas to the topic: \- AX-Line cant run WDS (easiest repeater setup) \- AX-Line can run as a "stupid" repeater as in: Connect to Wifi X Bridge to own WiFi in AP Mode. No capsman. See: [https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/313262189/Configuring+repeater](https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/313262189/Configuring+repeater) As you already want to go the "buy another" device route it seems like i could recommend an AX3. Might be a lot more expensive depending on where you live, but it can offer quite a bit more Wi-Fi range. For a "real world" comparison of the ax2 or ax3: In one setup i did the ax3 has around 4x the range of an ax2 (always depends on A LOT of factors, but the big antennas do help a lot) But if you just want to add an AP id personally would just go with a hap ax S (cause cheap) and then ignore capsman. And yes keep in mind the usual of "location scouting" and "frequency optimizations".

To answer your questions and to add more ideas to the topic: \- AX-Line cant run WDS (easiest repeater setup) \- AX-Line can run as a "stupid" repeater as in: Connect to Wifi X Bridge to own WiFi in AP Mode. No capsman. See: [https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/313262189/Configuring+repeater](https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/313262189/Configuring+repeater) As you already want to go the "buy another" device route it seems like i could recommend an AX3. Might be a lot more expensive depending on where you live, but it can offer quite a bit more Wi-Fi range. For a "real world" comparison of the ax2 or ax3: In one setup i did the ax3 has around 4x the range of an ax2 (always depends on A LOT of factors, but the big antennas do help a lot) But if you just want to add an AP id personally would just go with a hap ax S (cause cheap) and then ignore capsman. And yes keep in mind the usual of "location scouting" and "frequency optimizations".