I have worked for a medium size ISP and we had Juniper, Cisco and lot of Mikrotiks.
For me the big lack in Mikrotik, compared to the bigger vendor, is the lack of real support. No TAC services, no SLA, etc. The only way to get support is via email, but you have to wait days for a response. And also the system is not stable like the one from big vendors.
Anyway, the performances of Mikrotik are impressive for the cost.
and TAC/support is half the reason you buy from the known vendors in the first place. (the other being well rounded and actual trustworthy performance numbers when using more niche network technologies, especially in regards to encapsulation).
for a comparison, I once had an issue where both routers in a redundant setup failed within half an hour of each other. (was a pure coincidence, the setup was redundant).
then, the sparefallback unit would not boot, and jtac send us a replacement within 3 HOURS...
100% agree.
At a moment we decided to buy 6/8 CCR instead to buy a couple of Juniper and keep the unused one as passive hot spare, just because it was cheap and sometimes the CCR failed.
Another point is the feature development: BGP implementation, in Mikrotik was single core only and this was a bottleneck especially when you want to calculate the full routing table. Everyone in the forum asked for this new feature, but Mikrotik always refuse to work on that.
