The vast majority of peoples' houses don't have WAN connections that need the capabilities of the higher-spec mikrotik routers anyways. An RB3011 or RB4011 is overkill for a residential cablemodem or VDSL2 based last mile service, in terms of pps and Mbps capacity, and NAT pps ability. The ubnt ER-X ($48) is good for up to about 700 Mbps of traffic, and comes with sane defaults.

If you have truly symmetric 1 Gbps full duplex at home maybe you need the capabilities of an RB4011. But you should learn how to lock down its WAN facing interface.

The ubnt EdgeOS based devices are based on a fork of Vyatta. Ubiquiti hired most of the Vyatta software development team years ago when Brocade acquired Vyatta (the corporation). Ultimately they are little tiny Debian based boxes, since that's the foundation vyatta was built on.

Why an edge router over unifi, for smaller setups (Triplebyte is what, 30 office people?)

I wouldn't recommend an edgerouter for a small office, maybe something a bit more serious. I was describing what I'd recommend for a residential/personal small home office setup. Mine is basically a 32x8 capable DOCSIS3.0 cable modem that is a dumb L2 bridge to the cable ISP's CMTS, an ER-X router, a managed mikrotik fanless L2 switch for the LAN, and several $79 UAP-AC-Lite (802.11ac not wave2, 2x2 MIMO, dual band APs).

>residential/personal small home office setup.

Home/Offsite - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/

Office - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/unifi-security-gateway-pr...

Large Office - https://unifi-xg.ubnt.com/usg-xg-8 (sweet 1U screen!)

$110, and same management interface as the AP's and switches. As you can tell, im prioritizing all-in-one management very heavily. One, managed, cloud, location for all my devices (minus sdwan, hosted by that vendor.) But the USG can do Auto IPSEC, so if you have 5 of them, you can tell all 5 to automatically keep connections to each other open. I havent fully tested a complex mesh of USG's yet, but id like to. It's getting close to even sdwan being expensive, compared to what these things can do.

One of the things I like the least about the Unifi management interface, is having to edit each site separately. If i want to make a router or ap/ssid change, I have to open each site.

From what I understand, some features on the USG aren't available unless you manipulate some JSON files, whereas they're exposed in the UI in the Edge Routers.

> by default they have way too much open on their public interfaces

They used to. Since about a year or so ago, the public interface is so completely locked down by default that I've heard people wondering if they've bought defective units (because they're trying to access management through eth1.)