Hi Team, Tell me about OpenWRT, is it a viable option in 2025.
Why would you use it, why would you not?
Juno
I would consider it a basic option with support for a lot of routers as a replacement firmware, but very limited when compared to something like pfsense.
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I used it on my Nighthawk R7800 router to set up VLANs early in my homelab journey. Its OK, and seems to be under constant development. But once I switched to pfsense, I never looked back at OpenWRT.
Just for fun, here’s what ClaudeAI had to say about this
Here are functional capabilities where pfSense has significant advantages or features that OpenWRT lacks:
High Availability & Clustering:
OpenWRT has no native HA solution
Advanced Multi-WAN:
OpenWRT has multi-WAN (mwan3), pfSense's implementation is more mature and feature-rich
Enterprise Traffic Management:
Built-in Certificate Authority:
OpenWRT requires manual OpenSSL commands
Advanced Monitoring & Diagnostics:
IDS/IPS Integration:
While OpenWRT can run these, the integration is manual and resource-constrained
ZFS Support:
OpenWRT is extremely capable for its target use case, but pfSense offers more "enterprise-grade" features designed for business network security and high availability scenarios.
Here are functional capabilities where OpenWRT has significant advantages or features that pfSense cannot do:
Wireless Capabilities:
pfSense has essentially no wireless support
Embedded ARM Hardware:
USB Peripheral Support:
Extensive support for USB modems (LTE/5G), allowing cellular WAN connections
USB storage for file sharing (Samba, FTP, DLNA media servers)
USB printers with print server functionality
Serial console adapters and other USB peripherals
Mesh Networking:
Customization & Build System:
Package Variety:
Broader package ecosystem
OpenWRT excels at maximizing what you can do with consumer-grade hardware and embedded devices, while pfSense focuses on traditional firewall/routing functions on more powerful x86 systems.
OpenWRT and DD-WRT are good for what they do. Keeping otherwise unsupported routers out of landfills. Beyond that, there are much better alternatives.
OpenWRT is great for a lot of things, but I think where it shines is replacing the firmware on commodity WiFi routers so you can use them as wireless access points.
People do apparently use OpenWRT everywhere from ISP customer hardware to in data centers. There’s a great episode of Heavy Networking about it, which I can’t find right now.
I use OpenWRT on my travel router.