Yeah, that's the cheapest device available. If you only need 2 ports, the apu2c0 is only $99 w/o case (~$10 for the case) [1]. An espressobin (w/o peripherals) goes for $50. EdgeRouter X (1 WAN, 4 LAN ports) goes for 50 EUR here, with SFP module it goes for 75 EUR. Those are competitive prices. Netgate's cheapest device is expensive by comparison. Doesn't say anything about the quality though!
These are full x86 machines that can handle a much different workload than an EdgeRouter X.
Try and do any kind of meaningful traffic shaping, firewalling, with an ERX. Or, just make some configuration change which knocks traffic handling out of silicon and into the CPU: you'll quickly see where the extra money would've been nice.
My only serious complaint about pfSense is that BSD only has single-threaded PPPoE, which really does not work well at anything approaching gigabit speeds.
> These are full x86 machines that can handle a much different workload than an EdgeRouter X.
These are x86-64 (AMD64) machines, running a 64-bit fork of FreeBSD. pfSense doesn't run on x86-32 anymore (even though x86-32 works perfectly fine as router). The argument is that its "ancient" hardware; yet here we are discussing single-threaded PPPoE...
EdgeRouter X is a bit weak, sure (though it also does not use a lot of power), EdgeRouter Lite (which I got) is already much better performance, sports a MIPS64 and more RAM.
> [..] you'll quickly see where the extra money would've been nice.
If I'd want the highest performance + bang of buck + got the time to maintain (including the hardware) I'd go for PC Engines plus OPNsense or Router-7. But I don't want to put a lot of effort/time in maintaining my home router.
I'm positive we'll have loads of fun with RISV-V routers in the near future. If not the big corps, perhaps smaller ones. Amazon also appears to have plans to sell switches with AWS support.
For the record: I run RouterOS in ESXi on a Supermicro SYS-5018D-FN8T (1U, Xeon D1518).
Mikrotik hardware suffers the same problems as Ubiquiti (and most other manufacturers): it's very easy to lose gigabit routing performance with even the most basic of home firewall rulesets.
I got no throughput issues with my Ubiquiti hardware whatsoever as long as I keep using hardware offloading. Which doesn't work with bridging. Either way I use a DMZ on the third port of my ER-L on which I run a WAP for guests which I (or they) fire up when they're here. Latency is very low on these MIPS machines.
