Flint 2

From your own shortlist, I've had great experience with the GL.iNet Flint 2. (GL-MT6000). It has 2 * 2.5GbE ports WiFi 6 USB 3.0 It ships with an old version of Openwrt and a custom skin but is an easy flash to vanilla.

For WiFi 6, consider the GL.inet Flint 2, it's a very highly rated router on Rtings. It has OpenWRT preinstalled, so it's highly configurable and highly extensible. It also has vanilla OpenWRT support, so even if GL.inet stops supporting the device, you can keep getting firmware updates from the Ope

Bad news, the Flint 3 is Broadcom based, not compatible with OpenWRT and probably will never be. The Flint 2 is MediaTek based and it works great. You still can use it with GL.iNet firmware, tho. EDIT: It's Qualcomm as pointed out. Still, no support for OpenWRT as of now.

It's been talked about on this sub but heres a video from CES 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S74Or0E0iEkhttps://nascompares.com/news/gl-inet-flint-4-wifi7-router-revealed-at-ces-2026/ And here it is on GL.iNet's blog:https://www.gl-inet.com/blog/glinet-debuts-secure-remote-access-for-enterpri

Flint 2 has FEMs (front-end modules) that sit in between the Wi-Fi radios and the antennas to boost range. The mt76 driver supports these FEMs which allows maximum legal TX power for most countries on the Flint 2, but the MTK driver/OEM firmware will often boost the signal using the FEMs to above th

GL.iNet Flint 2 (MT-6000) all day and twice on Sunday. https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt6000

If the NanoPi R6S is too expensive/hard to find, you should seriously look at the GL.iNet Flint 2 (MT6000). Don't be fooled by the 'consumer router' shell. Inside, it has the MediaTek Filogic 830 (MT7986), which is a quad-core ARM A53 @ 2.0GHz. If you just want a wired router/firewall, you can simpl

BPI-R4 (MT7988), most powerful but not recommended for Wi-Fi due to Wi-Fi NIC issues. GL.iNET Flint 2 (MT7986), currently best supported device for Wi-Fi. BPI-R3 (MT7986), like Flint 2 but with SFP. Flint 2's Wi-Fi will be better though as it is not a dev board. Flint 3 (Qualcomm IPQ 53xx), for Wi-F

At the hardware level what router you buy does not matter much. 500mb/s can be handled cheaply. What you pay for is good wireless performance and software features like smart traffic management and DNS based ad-blocking. For those reasons I recommend a Flint 2. It runs a modified version of OpenWRT

Not a cheap suggestion, but GL.iNet routers are absolutely fantastic for this usecase. I'm using a Flint 2 connected to my airtel router in bridge mode.