On the nerdier side of that. More exotic features, lot less nice UI, lots of (cheap) lower-performance options and sometimes obscure product variations.

I.e. among people where I know what kind of stuff they have, anybody vaguely technical might have an Ubiquiti AP for their WiFi, whereas the people that love to tinker with networking stuff have some mikrotik device somewhere to play with.

I landed on MikroTik for a recent build because you simply can’t get Ubiquity right now. And I’m glad I did, what a great product. Checkout their newest RB5000 and CCR2000 series. Very powerful arm cores with sfp+ options at an incredibly reasonable price.

This is also my experience. Best technical person I know recommended it.

Yes, but possibly with more ambition to be a budget alternative to Cisco and Juniper. Looking at the presentations under https://mum.mikrotik.com/, it seems there are quite a few ISPs running on MikroTik kit, especially in less-developed parts of the world.

A big complaint about routeros6 is the time it takes for a full BGP table to converge - especially on the top-of-range cloud core routers.

I don't deal much with IXPs, but I did hear somewhere that there were a shockingly high number of mikrotik peers at one exchange point (10%+)

As a Network Admin at an ISP in Brazil I can confirm their products are extremely popular due to the basically unbeatable price to performance and especially price to features. I can't think of anything close to their retail prices that can offer BGP, OSPF, MPLS, VRF, Wireguard, iptables, L3 hardware-acceleration, MLAG, ZeroTier, RPKI, VRRP, VXLAN, ECMP, Recursive Routing, LetsEncrypt, CA, REST API, etc. They have a 4x 10Gbps switch that has all of these features for $150.

You could potentially build a Linux PC to do some of the more basic stuff that most ISPs require at a similar price, such as PPPoE concentrators, but it's still a lot more hands-on work for no clear benefit.

I can't find right now what the market share of peering routers is in Rio's IX, but i feel like it's significantly higher than 10% (probably between 20 to 30%).

I just bought a bunch of Ubiquiti equipment (UDM Pro + 10G Switch Aggregate + U6-LR AP) and I've been super happy with it. Putting sexy UI aside, the performance is outstanding and rock solid.

Unifi really does unify the entire ecosystem, it's basically the Apple of network gear down the quality of packging. I love it.

I heard good things about Mikrotik but their product line feels scattered and unorganized.

I've always found the Ubiquiti interface flashy but borderline unusable. Things are scattered everywhere to the point you need 26 clicks to get to anything and they keep moving things around (especially their awful cloud UI for the UDM)

Totally agree, I am not a fan of deeply hierarchical UI.