Edge Router Lite vs Edge Router X

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BigBadAl

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 16, 2010
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Anyone have any quick and simple info regarding the major differences between these two?

Aside from the POE capabilities of the ERX and more ports, it looks like the ERX (better) is cheaper than the ERL (less ports and no POE).

I wish UBNT had a comparison tool on their site but they don't seem to, they do have the corresponding products data sheets but trying to faff about with those on my phone just isn't gonna happen.

Thanks in advance
 
The X doesn't provide PoE, rather it can be powered by PoE and pass it along to another device.
 
@ goodcooper
That depends, it's way faster if you dont use or cannot use hardware acceleration compared to the ERL. That said, why you could go for ERX instead of a WiTi board is beyond me in terms of bang for the buck.
 
Lovely, this is what I'm after.

Yeah, I knew about the POE on the ERx

Keep it coming...
 
I'll admit, the Witi board looks interesting and I might pick one up.. when I don't have to order from overseas, it comes with a case, and the OS/firmware comes preinstalled. Until then, I'm very happy with my ERL and my only regret is not spending the extra to get the ER POE instead. Yes, I've read the power outage corruption issues, but in today's age who can't afford to throw it on a dedicated UPS, even at home. My personal plan is to have the cable modem, router, and a WAP connected to a dedicated UPS which should give me at least 1-2 hours of complete power loss protection.

OP: my understanding is that the ERX doesn't have hardware acceleration (routing is all done via software) as opposed to the ERL which where routing is done in the hardware, unless you start enabling things like DPI and traffic analysis or bridging the two LAN ports which puts everything into software-mode. From what I've read, the PPS rate on the ERX is a lot lower and overall throughput performance appears to be about 1/2 of the ERL. On most home connections (Comcast, Uverse, etc.) it probably doesn't matter. If you happen to have Google Fiber or similar, then the ERL would probably give you better performance.
 
diizzy said:
@ goodcooper
That depends, it's way faster if you dont use or cannot use hardware acceleration compared to the ERL. That said, why you could go for ERX instead of a WiTi board is beyond me in terms of bang for the buck.
Click to expand...

As you know, ERX and WiTi are functionally the same hardware.
Difference is that ERX has a large enterprise company with functional support and warranty.

That doesn't make the WiTi bad, it's just a difference worth recognizing.
 
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Zangmonkey said:
As you know, ERX and WiTi are functionally the same hardware.
Difference is that ERX has a large enterprise company with functional support and warranty.

That doesn't make the WiTi bad, it's just a difference worth recognizing.
Click to expand...

Also, the ERL runs EdgeOS which is a fork of Vyatta. Personally I find EdgeOS/Vyatta far superior to OpenWRT.
 
diizzy said:
@ goodcooper
That depends, it's way faster if you dont use or cannot use hardware acceleration compared to the ERL. That said, why you could go for ERX instead of a WiTi board is beyond me in terms of bang for the buck.
Click to expand...

diizzy said:
If you want gbit performance go Turris Omnia
Click to expand...

As others have said, crowdfunded projects are great and all but they are still crowdfunded. No case, un-needed features, custom assembly, no warranty and no support. That doesn't make them bad projects at all, sometimes you just need a little standardization and support.

If this is for a home project that is okay with downdime and many man-hours setting things up, then sure, go the "custom route". It'll be fun if you like that kind of thing.

If this is for anything but a home "fun" setup then remember: "Any IT-Pro will tell you a turnkey product that does less and costs more is better than a 1-off custom setup any day of the week. Why? Warranty service and support."

As for the main question: ER-L will do gigabit routing if you don't use certain features that disable hardware acceleration. If you do use those features, typically the ER-X is a better choice because of the CPU. POE on the ER-X is also non-standard 24V POE. Keep that in mind.
 
I have a ER-X, for my needs it is great (for now). I power it using POE on eth0, and passthru POE on eth4 to my UAP. When It comes to needing something better I will probably go with the EdgeRouter Pro, EdgeSwitch, and UniFi AP AC Pros. But for most home connections, a ER-X is fine. Up until Charter started having issues, I was also running a HE.net IPv6 tunnel through mine without any issues.
 
I've had an ERX for a month now and anytime it loses connection to my VDSL modem I have to power cycle the ERX or the internet to work again. Anyone else having this same problem?
 
I recently bought an ER-X to replace my ASUS RT-N16 that died. I've deployed multiple ERPoe‑5 units for various projects.

One thing to note about the ERX, it has a small issue when it power cycles, it acts as a switch on all ports. There is a fix for it on the ubnt forums that re-writes the bootloader.

I am even looking into using the ER-Lite to replace a pair of pfsense servers in a 2 wan 3 lan office, port count isn't an issue since you can easily vlan it.
 
The difference is simple. The ERX is a switch with software routing. This is similar to most consumer grade hardware, wifi routers, etc. No hardware acceleration.

The ERL is a hardware router. Faster for routing that is able to be offloaded to hardware. This is also why it is slower if you use it as a switch (multiple ports same lan)
 
"Get the brand new Turris Omnia router in a beautiful high-quality polycarbonate case with extraordinary minimalist design. Power supply and antennas, Wi-Fi cards and cooler are included."
Not sure what's the issue
 
diizzy said:
"Get the brand new Turris Omnia router in a beautiful high-quality polycarbonate case with extraordinary minimalist design. Power supply and antennas, Wi-Fi cards and cooler are included."
Not sure what's the issue
Click to expand...

You know that is a crowdfunding campaign for an unreleased, unproven, and possibly vaporware product and not something for sale right now... Right?

This is like telling someone not to buy a Toyota Camry they need because they could get a Tesla Model 3 instead.
 
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Yeah, NIC.CZ are obviously known for their vaporware. The Turris project that has been running for quite sometime now and they've been doing presentations about it at icann, ripe,nanog etc so yeah... It's all vaporware not to mention their previous Turris platforms...

Do you guys have something against projects/organisations that aren't US-based? The guys managed to get their goal within 3 days which is really good effort.

Also about unproven, if you tried googling for 5 secs you can quickly tell it's based upon the same SoC as the Linksys WRT1900ACS but with much better expandability and open hardware (PCIe slots etc). The SoC does have Linux mainline support. You also have Solidrun's ClearFog-series but support is so-so at best from what I hear.

Not to mention, your "enterprise"-company still have issues with devices not handling sudden powercuts at all, seems great 2015 for an enterprice appliance.
 
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diizzy said:
Yeah, NIC.CZ are obviously known for their vaporware. The Turris project that has been running for quite sometime now and they've been doing presentations about it at icann, ripe,nanog etc so yeah... It's all vaporware not to mention their previous Turris platforms...

Do you guys have something against projects/organisations that aren't US-based? The guys managed to get their goal within 3 days which is really good effort.

Also about unproven, if you tried googling for 5 secs you can quickly tell it's based upon the same SoC as the Linksys WRT1900ACS but with much better expandability and open hardware (PCIe slots etc). The SoC does have Linux mainline support. You also have Solidrun's ClearFog-series but support is so-so at best from what I hear.
Click to expand...

So where can you buy one right now? Oh nowhere? Exactly.
 
Huh? I'm not sure if you're confused, the previous routers were handed out as part of a research project, you can read about here: https://www.turris.cz/en/ .
You have all hardware documentation here: https://www.turris.cz/en/hardware-documentation

FWIW, I have a few DIR-860L (b1) installed as firewalls and VPN gateways running OpenWRT and the all runs fine even if the connection temporarily dies. That's a cutdown version of the WiTi board (lacks SATA, 128Mbyte RAM) however...
 
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Mopower said:
I've had an ERX for a month now and anytime it loses connection to my VDSL modem I have to power cycle the ERX or the internet to work again. Anyone else having this same problem?
Click to expand...

My parents have been experiencing a similar issue with their ERL. After a week or so I'll need to power cycle the router, and then it won't automatically reconnect. I originally bought an ERL since it was low powered, had a featureset and CLI I could work with, and was around the price of a consumer wireless router. Needless to say it's been a bit of a pain and I wouldn't mind swapping that out for a cheap mITX pfSense build at this point.
 
diizzy said:
Huh? I'm not sure if you're confused, the previous routers were handed out as part of a research project, you can read about here: https://www.turris.cz/en/ .
You have all hardware documentation here: https://www.turris.cz/en/hardware-documentation

FWIW, I have a few DIR-860L (b1) installed as firewalls and VPN gateways running OpenWRT and the all runs fine even if the connection temporarily dies. That's a cutdown version of the WiTi board (lacks SATA, 128Mbyte RAM) however...
Click to expand...

Dude you need to figure out the difference between a project and a product. You can't buy an Omnia and the original Turris sounds like it it collecting more data than Google and Microsoft combined. Furthermore, you can buy the original Turris router either, you need to sign up and see if they select you as a data collection specimen:

Due to the research nature of the project, we are offering the device for a symbolic price of one Czech crown. In order to participate in the project, the user is required to commit to using the Turris router as the main internet gateway for his network for a specified period of time, and not to intervene in collection of data.
Click to expand...

Just to be clear, if someone needs a router, they should pay $200 and wait until April 2016 to get a router that *might* be a decent router from a company focusing on data collection?
 
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diizzy said:
Yeah, NIC.CZ are obviously known for their vaporware. The Turris project that has been running for quite sometime now and they've been doing presentations about it at icann, ripe,nanog etc so yeah... It's all vaporware not to mention their previous Turris platforms...

Do you guys have something against projects/organisations that aren't US-based? The guys managed to get their goal within 3 days which is really good effort.

Also about unproven, if you tried googling for 5 secs you can quickly tell it's based upon the same SoC as the Linksys WRT1900ACS but with much better expandability and open hardware (PCIe slots etc). The SoC does have Linux mainline support. You also have Solidrun's ClearFog-series but support is so-so at best from what I hear.

Not to mention, your "enterprise"-company still have issues with devices not handling sudden powercuts at all, seems great 2015 for an enterprice appliance.
Click to expand...

For double the price I can buy a router I'll get in 5 months that might be better, but no body knows because the product won't be shipped for another 5 months.

Or at the same price, I can get something without a case, power supply, antenna, or cooler.

You should know implementation and QC matter as much as the SoC does. Just because two products use the same SoC doesn't mean performance is going to be anywhere near the same. Until this specific product is rolling off the assembly line and someone gets a production model in hand to test, I'm going to say it is an untested, unreleased product.

And if have problems arise, I can call UBNT and get a resolution. You have to hit the internet...that may or not be accessible because your router isn't working.

I use Untangle on an old computer as my router. I understand what I'm doing and am under no illusions that I have equal or better support than if I'd have purchased a router from Cisco or whoever. Its just one of the trade-offs you make for using a project vs a product.

Considering enterprises usually have some sort of uninterruptable power supply, I find that to be a relative non-issue. Even in my home network, I bought a small $50 UPS that keeps my network going for several hours.

Maybe if you're buying a $100 router you can make a small investment in better power?
 
@ Ocellaris
CZ.NIC are very open about what statistics they collected and clearly informed all parties, even the source code is available for everything if you have any doubt. You're free to run anything you want on your Omnia, OpenWRT is completely open source so you can run that instead if you want. You're free to come up with something better....

@ BigJayDogg3
Feel free to provide a link to such a platform, they have very good technical expertise and you can read about their other hardware projects.
If you have issues UBNT it's not going to be resolved, you still have the corruption issues and as others have mentioned their routers aren't "rock solid". A product will rarely be 100% bug-free but you still have major issues with the ERL/ERX-series that hasn't been addressed yet and probably never will be.
 
You can run whatever you want on an Onnia after you paid $200 and waited 6 months for it? Fascinating, too bad there are already routers that can run multiple firmware types without an issue.

I am all for the Onnia doing well, however it is disingenuous to treat it like a finished retail product.
 
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diizzy said:
@ Ocellaris
CZ.NIC are very open about what statistics they collected and clearly informed all parties, even the source code is available for everything if you have any doubt. You're free to run anything you want on your Omnia, OpenWRT is completely open source so you can run that instead if you want. You're free to come up with something better....

@ BigJayDogg3
Feel free to provide a link to such a platform, they have very good technical expertise and you can read about their other hardware projects.
If you have issues UBNT it's not going to be resolved, you still have the corruption issues and as others have mentioned their routers aren't "rock solid". A product will rarely be 100% bug-free but you still have major issues with the ERL/ERX-series that hasn't been addressed yet and probably never will be.
Click to expand...

What major issues are you referring to?
 
/usr/home said:
What major issues are you referring to?
Click to expand...

Take what he says as a grain of salt. He/She is the resident "Anti UBNT". We should have his title poofed next time Kyle has some fun.

I have three dozen ERL's deployed without any issues or failures.
 
klank said:
Take what he says as a grain of salt. He/She is the resident "Anti UBNT". We should have his title poofed next time Kyle has some fun.

I have three dozen ERL's deployed without any issues or failures.
Click to expand...

That's why I asked. I want to hear of these "major issues".
 
FS corruption, ERX does seen to have stability issues, doing bridging seems to more or less kill performance (wth?)
UBNT 11n APs are good however but their routers are overrated...
Not isolated to UBNT but most vendors doesn't promptly release firmwares upon OpenSSL/PolarSSL security advisories... (if you're paranoid)
 
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The only general issue with stability in the Edgerouters that I'm aware of is that some of the early Lites had problematic flash storage. This seems to have been fixed long ago. FWIW, my Lite has been absolutely solid.

Bridging interfaces on the Lite does kill hardware acceleration for them. Not much use for this really, and you're better off using a switch, anyways. Unfortunately, this also extends to link aggregation (e.g., LACP), which I believe to be a more grievous problem. The X does not have any hardware acceleration features (the CPU is faster to help compensate), so this should be irrelevant for it.

And yeah, it would be nice if all the SOHO vendors/distributions were better at keeping up with security updates.

diizzy seems to enjoy bagging on the more established/popular choices in favor of the new shiny. For example.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
diizzy seems to enjoy bagging on the more established/popular choices in favor of the new shiny. For example.
Click to expand...

Lmao.

Shopping with dizzy:

mom: "honey, we are going to buy an established product with a warranty. Dizzy: " but mom, I read about this new product, its new and cool and does stuff and is new and cool and I read that the one you want messes up sometimes and the new one is new and cool and new."
Mom: "dizzy honey, sometimes we buy things that have support, a warranty and are available right now."
Dizzy: "but mom, look, see this picture? There is a price too, that means you can get it now... But mom, this one is new and pretty and new and stuff!"

Bottom line like I said before is you can get either of the products dizzy suggested.

Personally, I would get an erl and a nice switch and call it good. The erx is nice, but unless you need bridging (hence the switch I suggested) there isn't a point.
 
@ BlueLineSwinger
The Mediatek chipset does have hardware acceleration but it's not implemented on UBNT's firmware. Mqmaker's repo does however (WiTi board)...
As for pfSense vs OPNsense, there's been a lot of concerns about the way the project is going into hence OPNsense which is being mentioned a lot in the BSD community. That said, I'd much rather use FreeBSD myself (which pf and opn are based on) but ppl seem to find UIs easier even though pf faster to use in CLI. Having that in mind, MIPS and ARM devices performs just as good as your x86 box and draws a lot less power in many cases not to forget, takes less space.

@ bds1904
Please do tell if either of these products does not work, if you're all about performance you can actually find faster platforms which are fully open source. It's not like UBNT have their own OS in their devices.... If you want support you still want to go for the larger vendors...
I have a ERL here, it works fine but it's slow and not really that impressive... Works fine for a backup device but I'd much rather (if you're looking for the low-end stuff anyway) go for a Mediatek MT7621A-based device running OpenWRT which is very easy to keep up to date and performs better in many cases.
 
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They aren't slow. They can route at 1Gb in most use cases. They do use their own "OS". It's basically a fork of Vyatta that they took and have changed and added features of their own.

They aren't meant for joe-blow home user. They never have been. IMO you shouldn't need to bridge the ports. It's a router, not a switch. If you want more ports, use a switch. It's the proper device.
 
diizzy said:
Having that in mind, MIPS and ARM devices performs just as good as your x86 box and draws a lot less power in many cases not to forget, takes less space.
.
Click to expand...

I disagree after having intel Baytrail D and Braswell (the newest one) moehtboards.
those x86 Intel SoC processor are fast!! and low power that can be compared ARM (MIPS is mostly behind ARM).

I measured baytrail d J1800 with a single fan + 8G RAM + DC2DC TX PSU and intel SSD 530. total average consumption is 8Watts.

Baytrail D does not has AES hardware.

if anyone plan to build pfsense or other... try Braswell celeron or pentium SoC since having AES that will ease processing when running vpn with AES.

I am running baytrail D motherboard with 3VM under proxmox 4.0....
IPCOP( with fully loaded addons), openvpn client , and house keeping (dynamic ddns updater, and etcs...
 
@ /usr/home
Until you need something that breaks hardware acceleration and you have ~250mbit or so... The MT7621A does about the double so in terms of raw performance its faster by far, if you need more bandwitdh you need to look at an ARM based platform or something more powerful.

@ robstar
That isn't much of an issue, they're just going to hold a state table and a bit more stuff.

@ cantalup
I didn't say all but if you're going for a plain firewall/gateway (which the ERL/ERX everything else mentioned is meant for) that's a ridiculously expensive setup.
 
I've been rocking an ERL with my fiber connection for a while now without any issues at all. My only issue was initial setup and that was solved when I flashed to the latest firmware at the time.

Although it does suck that I can only use one port on the ERL for the same subnet since bridging the two ports causes severe (sub 250Mb/sec) performance drops, but it's not really much of an issue since my 8 port gigabit switch has more than enough ports for all my wired devices.
 
diizzy said:
I didn't say all but if you're going for a plain firewall/gateway (which the ERL/ERX everything else mentioned is meant for) that's a ridiculously expensive setup.
Click to expand...

you did say on power consumption!
you mentioned power consumption on x86 is more than ARM( or MIPS). and I prove that your assumption is wrong!!
with more power computing + low power on Intel Soc Low power and very cheap consumer motherboard. Intel is competing with ARM and MIPS :p.


expesnive matter is not numbers (depends on your side), this is my situation:
the consumer intel low power SoC motherboard, was $35(new).. , I have 4G from previous upgrade. I move to 8G due on running proxmox and plan to run more VMs..
Total I spent was $88 total, if I did not to buy 8G RAM -> $54..
I can run not only router in VM , but can run more other VMs. this is the beauty on virtualization.

oops, ebay is my source to buy cheap used parts :D.

just my thought:
if I need to move to another platform, only a conversion happens as I did moving from VMs on esxi 5.X to proxmox 4.0( was 3.4)
 
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