Thanks @C3PO How much did you pay for that device? The base variant seems to 160 USD or so. Is it available in India directly?
Yeah the IPS/IDS things would be bit resource intensive.
I had looked at pfSense earlier, but then I felt it was overkill at least for my use cases. So stuck with OpenWRT and MikroTik for now. There's also pfSense supported mini pcs available on AliExpress with 4 Intel NICs etc for around 150 USD or so, can try that approach too, if anyone else is interested in going the pfSense path.
I am glad to see options like this. The only reason why i went with pfSense is because it is open source and I didn't want to shell out money for an annual subscription plan for the router/firewall maintenance updates.
Yes, it would be better if you bought a Chinese low power PC with min 4 GB RAM, 4 Intel NICs (important to have only Intel not Realtek) an an AES-NI capable CPU. MMC or SSD storage is up to you. These are avaialble on AliExpress. I use a Transcend 128 GB MSata SSD on my Netgate box. It dual boots OPNSense, another open source firewall, which is installed on the built in and non removable MMC.
The Mikrotik hAP ac² is a pretty decent device, you can get it for about 5k or so. Continous maintenance updates, supports multiple WAN interfaces and pretty much anything you want. The hardware is decent too, can do Gigabit WAN with basic IP filters and queues if you need it. Wireless performance is pretty good too.
Yep, I spent some time researching and then decided against it at least for now. But yeah, if I need to go for something more powerful in the future, will definitely go for a minipc + pfsense.