before buying expensive routers check OpenWRT’s table of hardware and buy one that is supported by the current OpenWRT release and has decent specs. There is a detailed installation guide for each supported device in the wiki too so there are no excuses it’s dead simple and Free yourself from stupid hardware manufacturers and their planed obsolescence products.
- Edit: also here is the new version of the table of hardware with more details They seem to have buyers guide too in the wiki.
- Edit2: seems like GL.iNet devices ship with OpenWRT out of the box with their GUI on top and you still have access to openwrt under the hood if you need it which sounds awesome so look into them if you’re interested. Thanks you guys who brought them up.
- Edit3: there is firewall sulotion called OPNSense which is not limited to commercial routers like OpenWRT and can be run on any x86 hardware of your choice (like N100 mini pcs) so like into it if you’re interested. Many thanks to the guys who contributed in the comments
- Edit4: Sorry for the multiple edits but some of you guys suggest some fantastic insights that I had to add. Anyways here is a list of good candidate devices for hassle free installation and yet powerful enough hardware from OpenWRT’s Forum
Any recs for a OpenWRT-supported router? The list is pretty deep
It comes down to specs and your needs but these are a must in my opinion:
- having atleast 128 mb of storage or some way to expand it.
- 256 mb of memory or more
- suppot WiFi 6 or better 6E or 7
- Support for mesh protocols if you need it
- Decent multi core chipset if you gonna run intensive tasks on it (like VPNs or DNS filtering) etc… the list goes on but like I said It really comes down to your needs ( on a side note consider read the details and installation guide page before buying some brands and models are easier than others to tinker with for sure)
This is a helpful starting place, thanks!
You’re welcome. Sorry I didn’t named some specific devices but that’s because device availability and price changes drastically region to region so something maybe a great deal where I live but that may not be the case for you or the other way around.that said Xiaomi and some Hauwei maybe tp-link devices are the best bang for the buck in my corner of the world look into those maybe that’s the case for you too. Also Here is the new version of the table of hardware with more details
I’m using a Linksys MX4300 I got from woot for like $20, seems pretty good.
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/best-newcomer-routers-2024/189050/2 this comes right from their forum and is a good list
Well, GL iNet 's router software is based on OpenWRT, so all of their’s. The UI of nicer, so I just leave their version on there; go through the “advanced settings” menu item to get the LuCI interface.
What I did when I was looking for a newer router to run OpenWRT was to look at their supported hardware list, narrow down to the ones with recent WiFi protocol support (in my case, WiFi 6), then compared prices. I was able to buy a used Belkin router for $20 on Ebay that did the trick.
I know openwrt actually realised a openwrt router.
I bought a flint 2 from glinet And it works pretty well
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I don’t recommend GL.inet routers. I have the Marble and it is slower than my ISPs router. It has a thing called network hardware acceleration, and it breaks my home server. Services just stop working well with it. So I keep it turned off. When I reported the issue they said it is working for them and came up with a completely hypotical setup…
With AdGuard enabled it frequently froze and I had to reboot it. For some reason even without AdGuard name resolution is noticeably slower. Doesn’t matter if I use my ISP’s DNS or not.
Also, DynDNS doesn’t support custom names, so I installed an alternative service for mywire.org.
Overally, this box came with drawbacks, but no doubt about it is hackable in the good way.
I would like to try openwrt’s own router, next time.
I remember the majority of routers in the past could not handle many half-open connections which had very negative impact on torrenting. Asus routers were the only ones that didn’t have that limit and i stuck with them since. Is that still a problem that exists?
I have port forwarding setup on my devices (Google WiFi running OpenWRT). I can connect to most piers on qbitorrent. My only limit seems to be my bandwidth Which is what we want.
Thank you, though that doesn’t really answer my question. Torrenting also worked back then but it would become slower than a router that could handle more half-open connections. If you have fast peers and a small number of torrents, it would probably not matter, but if you seed 100+ torrents at the same time, you’d notice.
I just bought the openwrt one a couple of minutes ago after using networkd+hostapd+nixos as my router for more than 2 years.
I bought a Dlink because it was cheap and was high end hardware. You can’t even add a firewall rule without adding a backdoor to Dlinks cloud portal.
Big mistake obviously.
