A great deal of control for little money. And you have to know what you are doing.

MikroTik puts one thing first: that the device does everything it technically can do, hiding nothing and charging nothing for functions. The system they carry inside is the same in the fifty-euro unit and in the thousand-euro one, so the small one routes, filters, makes tunnels, hands out addresses, measures traffic and is programmed just like the big one. With no other brand on this page do you buy so much capability for so little.

What it gives up is the hand-holding. There are no default values to save you, there is no wizard to stop a dangerous configuration, and the manufacturer's support is not a telephone number with a contract behind it: it is documentation, forums and an enormous community. The names for things are their own and do not always match the rest of the world's, so anyone coming from another brand has some unlearning to do.

You recognise it in radio links and in the routers of small and medium sites: rural internet providers, campsites, industrial estates, scattered installations with long runs between units. And you recognise it in the two ways you find it installed: spotless, done by somebody who knew what they were doing, or a minefield done by somebody who copied a recipe from a forum.

There is a desktop program of their own that shows the whole configuration in windows, a web panel and a full command line. All three do the same thing and the command line is the one to use, because the entire configuration can be dumped to a text file, saved, compared and applied to another unit. That lets you work with templates without paying for a management tool.

It is also genuinely programmable: it has a scripting language and scheduled tasks inside the device itself, so checks, alerts and reactions can be automated without any external server. It is one of those capabilities that do not appear in a feature comparison and that change the day to day of whoever maintains forty sites.

On the link to the outside and between buildings with no fibre. Joining two industrial units separated by waste ground, taking four cameras to a weighbridge three hundred metres away, getting a site cabin onto the network: there a pair of radio units from this house resolve in a morning what by trench is weeks and a lot of money. With the usual caveat: a radio link needs line of sight and a calculation beforehand, not good intentions.

We would not put it where the client needs to be able to ring a manufacturer with a response contract. In infrastructure where an outage has consequences, part of what you buy is who to complain to on a Sunday, and here that does not exist in the form a large organisation expects. There are critical installations running on this and running well, but with somebody inside who masters it.

And we would not put it if nobody — neither the client nor us — is going to take ownership of maintaining it. This is the real point: a unit from this house left unupdated and with its administration reachable from the internet is a target, and there have been known flaws exploited at scale precisely on units nobody looked at again after installing them. It is not a defect of the manufacturer: it is that here nothing fixes itself. If the answer to «who updates it» is nobody, something else has to go in.

Here there is little to fear and it is worth saying, because it is the sharp contrast with other brands on this list. The unit comes with its lifetime licence included in the price: there is no annual subscription, there is no function that switches off, there is no expiry date that leaves a switch stopped. What you buy, you keep.

What does cost money every year is the maintenance: somebody has to read the release notes, update and check. That does not come in the box and it is the real cost of this brand. Anyone who does not budget for it is fooling themselves about the saving.

If your IT department has somebody who genuinely knows networks, this is a gift: total control, no licences, no depending on anyone, and the ability to automate whatever they want. There are IT teams that prefer this brand precisely for that reason, and when we arrive at a client like that what we do is agree with them, not talk them into something else.

If there is nobody with that profile, the honest thing is to say so up front. The day-to-day tasks — see whether a camera is connected, restart a port, look at how much traffic is passing — are manageable with one training session and a one-page procedure. Changing filtering rules, touching the network tree, modifying the routing or updating are not: there a small change leaves the installation working and lying, or simply locks you out of the unit.

So the boundary is drawn with the client at the table and written down: what their people can touch, what they warn about first, and who is responsible for updating and how often. With a copy of the configuration kept outside the unit, an alternative way in and the administrator passwords in the client's name. If nobody is left responsible for updating, this brand is not the answer and we say so before selling it.

We have no contractual relationship with the manufacturer to tell you about, and we are not going to tell you this is better or worse. We are going to tell you who it is for: for whoever has their own judgement inside, or for whoever accepts that somebody takes charge of maintaining it. For everyone else, there are more expensive and more restful options.