Why Mikrotik?
Do your own research
For those of you who know me, I'm a stoic and a realist. Don't blindly follow my personal advice, or the advice of others. As an engineer, you should always do your own research and make your own decisions. Why I use Mikrotik is my personal choice, and I'm not trying to sell you on it. I'm just sharing my experience and knowledge with you. If my experience sells you on Mikrotik, that's great. If not, you can go with some other networking hardware.
My experience with Mikrotik
About 15 years ago (between 2008 and 2011), I was the lead network engineer for a small local ISP called "SweaSAT" in Brčko, Bosnia.
Here is a video of me putting a Mikrotik RB600 into a case, which we eventually installed on either a water tower or a very tall building in our town, I don't recall exactly where. Here is another video of me at "Beotel" in Belgrade, where I received mentorship in network engineering and Mikrotik. Beotel was a major ISP in Belgrade.
At SweaSAT, I maintained 16 wirelessly connected routerboards within a 50-kilometer radius. We used Mikrotik RouterBOARDs with Omni and Pacific antennas, and of course, Link antennas for point-to-point connections. Our target users were in rural areas or locations without access to ADSL or cable internet (which was unavailable in Bosnia at the time). We installed Mikrotik devices on the highest points in town, water towers, tall buildings, and even rooftops in nearby villages.
Wherever we installed the routerboards, Mikrotik was always the backbone of our network. It was reliable and, at the time, offered an unbeatable price-to-performance ratio. Comparable equipment from companies like Cisco would have been prohibitively expensive.
Fast forward to 2025, and I still use Mikrotik devices at home. My preference may be influenced by my past experience, but Mikrotik has never let me down. As this guide and its new use case show, Mikrotik remains an excellent choice.
Fifteen years later, Mikrotik is even better, offering more features, better documentation, and strong community support. As a European company, Mikrotik also complies with all EU regulations.
Resources and Community
Overall, Mikrotik is a great choice for both, enterprise and home use. Mikrotik has a great YouTube channel with a lot of tutorials and guides. If you'd like to learn more about how to use Mikrotik, I can highly recommend a Udemy author Maher Haddad who has a lot of great courses on Mikrotik. I personally have bought nearly all of his courses, as I had to re-learn things that I haven't used in 15 years. Additionally, there are many great content creators on YouTube who are sharing their knowledge about Mikrotik, make sure to check them out. One I can recommend is The Network Berg. I watched some of his videos and they are great.
And before I forget, make sure to watch 5 reasons to choose MikroTik, it's a great video.