OpenWrt vs DDWrt

dd-wrtfirmwareopenwrtroutertomato

I have a TP-Link Wr1043ND router and I want to install one of these two firmwares:

I read that I can install custom packages and do much more than I can with the original firmware.

I would like to ask someone with experience in using both OpenWRT and DD-WRT which he would recommend and why. And to give a few reference points I'm interested in:

  1. reliability – network stability both on cable and wireless and on the usb drive
  2. performance – network speed, very important also usb drive speed
  3. configurability – the possibility to add extensions such as a torrent client, FTP, SSH, WWW and SVN server directly
  4. ease of use – the ease of installation and configuration of the router
  5. support/docs – how much info there is if you stumble upon a problem and you have to find some documentation, or if there's any free support (but that's a longshot)

Of course I don't imagine that I will find the perfect firmware and that one is vastly superior over the other.

Also if there's anyone out there who uses one of these firmwares on a TP-Link Wr1043ND, it would be great to get some feedback about the impact of the changes from the original firmware.

P.S. I'm open also for Tomato if it's the better one.

Best Answer

Dec 2020 update: still all-in with OpenWRT, everything works beautiful.

Overall, OpenWRT if you really want flexibility. I dumped DD-WRT (WRT54G) for OpenWRT (ASUS WL-500gP) because of this (related to this), haven't had a regretful moment yet. Not even close.

  1. reliability – I am not aware that one is significantly more reliable than the other. Both have quite lengthy release cycles, which have yet another bunch of users complaining.
  2. performance – I'm pretty certain it mostly depends on the hardware device and best compatible drivers most of all.
  3. configurability – OpenWRT package management system should win easily here.
  4. ease of use – I liked DD-WRT web UI, I don't have a particular problem with LuCI either. LuCI just got bumped to 0.10 branch in 10.03.1-rc5, which is another step up. But overall I'm definitely loving OpenWRT's /etc. Things in there make sense when you need them to.
  5. support/docs – Both have phpBB forums with significant traffic.
Related Question