I'll second the recommendation on the TP-Link Archer C7. It's a really nice, not too expensive, piece of kit. Bought one for my folks to replace a cheap old Walmart-grade LinkSys, and it was night and day better - now my dad can pick up usable signal in his garage, 500 yards away from the router.
Initially I was also planning to buy the Archer C7 but it seems OpenWRT is not flawless on it. This is unfortunate since that appears to be the recommended router for OpenWRT, so there is nothing on which OpenWRT works perfectly.
Right now, it is very important to have a router with firmware you can trust and upgrade, otherwise sooner or later it will join a botnet. Therefore for me any router option without FLOSS firmware support is eliminated.
Edit: Just read the comment above about OpenWRT being dead. Looking into LEDE.
I am running an Archer C7 v2 on OpenWRT. Works flawlessly. Some notes though:
- 5ghz only worked after manually inserting the latest firmware blob for the qca9880 chip and setup only works via shell for it, setting any options for it from the web interface breaks stuff
- it's fast enough... I'm running a freeradius2 server on it, SMB shares on two 32gb USB pendrives, miniDLNA, DHCP for ~50 physical and virtual clients, a VPN tunnel to a VPS and so on. Never hits full load.
- 2.4ghz range is massive, 5ghz less so obviously...
- it is absolutely stable however, uptime exceeds two months and the only reason for shutting it down back then was a move, almost nine months before that
If you're simply looking for APs I would recommend Unifi UAP-AC-Pros though.
I got Linksys WRT1900ACS at home. The router works very well with original firmware but as you expect is very limited in terms of features compared to opernwrt(and others open source alternatives). I was running openwrt for almost 6 months. Even that it said even on the box it works with openwrt the wifi support is complete shit! The wifi driver is performing so bad it will turn your life in to living hell. Expect disconnects and low bandwidth when using wifi (for both 5G and 2.4G). Recently I restored the original firmware and the wifi is performing great but is just a wifi router now. Nothing more. I lost all the additional features that motivated me to buy it. I want to throw it out the window!! Imo stay away from linksys if you want open source firmware and advanced features.
I have a TP-Link Archer C7, and while it has generally been pretty good, the last six months or so it will simply drop all connectivity and require a reboot. Pretty frustrating (happens 2-3x/week) and has me looking for another replacement. This is with stock firmware though, so I would hope, but haven't tried, that alternative firmwares would fare better.
I've had the same issue happen, running Archer C7 running OpenWRT. But I'm not 100% sure it's actually the router or whether it's really a problem with my ISP. I haven't seen the issue in a couple of months now, yet I've made no changes to my setup.
I did have considerable issues getting both wifi interfaces to work well at the same time, but that's probably more due to my own incompetence more than anything. I did finally manage to make it work, much like how you'd wiggle antennae on an old tv back in the day and suddenly you got a signal.
Why not just try flashing OpenWRT? I've been using the Archer C5 with OpenWRT for over a year and everything has been working flawlessly. Setup is incredibly easy as well.
In my experience the alternative firmwares were worse.
I ended up contacting TP-Link support and they were actually quite helpful though. They sent me a beta firmware that's mostly resolved the issues. I don't know if it's been publicly released yet though (I got it around a year ago now from memory).
Software support for the Marvell platform used by those Linksys routers is nowhere near as mature as for Qualcomm-Atheros hardware. It's improving, but definitely hasn't seen the kind of thorough widespread testing that QCA platforms get.
This comment is correct. Atheros was a long-time Linux/OSS friendly-ish vendor, where Marvell isn't. Marvell has been making some positive moves, but they are still GPL violators and don't work with the community like QCA does. That being said, some Marvell-based routers are pretty well supported now, like the Linksys AC1900.
I'm having pretty good luck with the WRT1200AC on DD-WRT. Note that OpenWRT doesn't seem to support v2 of this device, which is what you'll get if you buy one now.
- TP-Link Archer C7 (supported by both DD-WRT and OpenWRT, and recommended by the latter)
- Linksys WRT1200AC/1900AC (supported by both DD-WRT and OpenWRT)
- Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LITE/LR/PRO (OpenWRT, diffrent models depending how much speed/range do you need. No routing here, just access points.)
For any models discussed, please keep in mind that depending on the hardware version, the firmware support is different.