OpenWRT is seriously good. The architecture (UCI, overlayfs, LuCI, etc) achieves what very few appliance-like firmwares can: extensibility without consistency problems.
Not to mention the zoned based firewall is seriously impressive. Rarely do I see such unified product vision in free software.
Owrt is such a great firmware, just the right amount of power user features and works-fine-out-of-the-box simplicity.
I use it on small GL iNet 150 (9€ on eBay) for plenty of things:
- a wifi repeater at my wife’s work building, with an autossh with reverse tunnel for remote admin. It also sends metrics to influxdb for monitoring. Uptime is in the 100s of days (due to electrical cut)
- another as wifi client and dhcp server on the two ethernet ports, to isolate and test devices as if they were on another network.
- a small nas with USB disk storage as a 2nd backup disk from my nas
All in a sub-powered package the size of a credit card.
You can do so much with so little things (4Mb flash, 32M ram). Owrt rocks!
Personally I prefer Vyos, though it has been a long time since I used openWRT. Needs something separate for wifi, so there I use Ubiquity Unifi access points, though one could do that with oWRT I suppose.
Not to mention the zoned based firewall is seriously impressive. Rarely do I see such unified product vision in free software.