I spend quite a bit of time on the Ubiquit forum in the EdgeMAX section (tag). The ER-X is what I know the most about. And right now, getting them is near impossible (unless you don’t mind paying much more than MSRP).
I had a “spare” ER-X at home for a VPN connection to work, but it got recalled for use at a branch that needed a “quick” working solution. When the official network admin got the hEX, it wasn’t obvious how to get it to work with a site-to-site vpn from a dynamic ip using gre/ipsec and ospf. We have “standard configs” that work with the ER-X to Cisco corp head end, so to expedite things, the ER-X I had at home was recalled to be used at the branch, and I was given the hEX S (RB760iGS) as a replacement, which has very similar hardware to the ER-X (same SoC, same RAM 256MB, but substantially less flash (16MB what were they thinking? vs 256MB on the ER-X). On the other hand, the hEX S does have a microSD slot and USB port, but I am not aware of any possibility to boot from that. The hEX S is still quite new to me. About the only reference to the microSD on the hEX S is for use with the Dude, and I don’t think that works with v7 (yet).
On the ER-X when you load a new version of firmware it essentially keeps the old version/configuration around until you manually delete it, and it is easy to switch system images (it is very similar in concept to having multiple boot partitions on a disk with the ability to switch which is the default boot partition.)
After I got the RB760iGS (hEX S) and tried getting vlans configured, I found the “man vs woman” control panel picture and edited it to replace man with “ER-X” and woman with “hEX S” I am not sure which one I copied from, so I can’t provide attribution, but here is my result that I sent to my co-worker, along with the comment that he had put a hex on me.
If all you want is a “consumer level” router with one WAN connection and a single LAN with 4 switch ports (similar to the ER-X WAN+2LAN2 single LAN config), the RB760iGS “default config” has presets for all the controls, but then it you want to modify it in any way, there really aren’t any great examples. And the other bad thing about MikroTik is that there are many different models, and you often have to use different methods to do the same thing. Vlans is a prime example, with at least 3 ways to configure them. It also seems that many of the wiki.mikrotik.com (now replaced by RouterOS - RouterOS - MikroTik Documentation) example configurations are gone (as can be confirmed by the wayback machine’s webarchive of 20210127 snapshot of Manual:TOC)
The ER-X has Setup wizards that make it easy to get a working config (similar to the MikroTik default), but the ER-X WAN+2LAN2 wizard also allows you to set up a second LAN with a second ip address, and it will setup a dhcp server for that subnet as well. It there is a way to do that easily on the hEX S, I didn’t find it. It is of course possible modify the config using either the command line, webfig, or winbox, and remove a port from the bridge, add an ip address, and dhcp server, and add the remove interface to the LAN interface list, but there is not an option change what the default config does (what pressing the reset button does). That’s similar to the edgerouter, but the Basic (aka WAN+2LAN2) setup wizard gives you more options that the quickset (well different, quickset appears to offer vpn, althought I have not tried that yet). And the FAQ suggests you shouldn’t mix quickset and webfig. My guess is because using quickset is somewhat like using the ER-X setup wizards, i.e. they don’t modify your existing config, they both replace the config starting with what you provide as the basis for the new configuration. You will discover that the first time you try to use quickset to modify something in your config (hopefully you backed up before you tried, fortuneately I had).
And vlans on the hEX S (at least before 7.1rc5) didn’t have support for hardware vlan-aware switch support (what Mikrotik now calls HW offload support for vlan-filtering on the primary bridge).
What’s new in 7.1rc5 (2021-Oct-25 20:15):
—snip—
*) bridge - added HW offload support for vlan-filtering on MT7621 switch chip (hEX, hEX S, RBM33G, RBM11G, LtAP);
Easy access to the vlan-aware switch0 on the ER-X has been there for the 4 years I have been using the ER-X. Yes, you can easily lock yourself out, but there are multiple youtube videos and blog posts with examples of how to avoid that.
With the hEX, I feel like I am playing a Zachtonics game (SHENZHEN I/O: BUILD CIRCUITS. WRITE CODE. RTFM. - from the web site description) or writing code for the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 PIO state machines. In other words, it seems like RouterOS is like assembly language programming, and each MikroTik model has a slightly different instruction set.
I wish there was a “Router O/S Rosetta Stone” with Cisco, Junos, Vyatta/VyoS/DanOS/EdgeOS, pfsense, RouterOS, OpenWRT, Untangle, Unifi, Omada… with some common configurations, and the configs in each “language”. As an example of common configs, what the EdgeOS setup wizards support. [REFERENCE] Setup Wizard ER-X v2.0.9-hotfix.1 reference configurations It would be even better to have configurations including VPN (ipsec, openvpn, wireguard, zerotier, some dynamic routing protocols (OSPF, BGP)
How did you learn RouterOS, and what features are you using that make you feel the hEX is a better router than other options (even OpenWRT on cheap hardware). Are you using MPLS, VRF? One thing that RouterOS does have going for it is that you can quite easily setup a virtual lab with EVE-ng or GNS3 and use the CHR images.
One last comment on EdgeOS on the ER-X vs RouterOS on the hEX S. Both are based on top of linux, but EdgeOS doesn’t hide it from you. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage (if the router gets compromised, there are a lot more tools to live off the land on the ER-X, and packages can even be loaded. But I find the tools very handy.
Both RouterOS and EdgeOS can be misconfigured by someone that doesn’t understand how the commands work, but I think that EdgeOS is much easier to understand than RouterOS. And therefore less likely to be misconfigured. But that could partly be because I am much more familiar with EdgeOS.