I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
Check out GL.iNet products. They’re all based on OpenWrt with a more beginner-friendly GUI on top. (LuCi can be installed via a few clicks.) And very affordable. Some can be flashed to vanilla OpenWrt as well.
This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.
Just because Asus has EoL’d doesn’t mean openwrt will drop support. In fact, you can get these routers for cheap now and breathe new life into them.
With openwrt your router will outlive you. You might have to take it out with a shotgun. I have a 20-year-old dsl router that the isp gave us for free and it will not die.
There are probably people reading this who are younger than this router, and don’t remember DSL… and yet this beast can absolutely run openwrt 23.xx.
https://openwrt.org/toh/actiontec/gt784wnv
I say “can” because I retired mine to the box a few years ago, running 19.xx and working like new. (Just that 100Mbps is too slow.)
Looking up the router, it was allegedly produced in 2024, according to the OpenWRT wiki. Barring any outliers, OpenWRT generally only sunsets hardware when a new version has higher hardware requirements than is provided by a device. The supported devices page lists out the hard requirements as well as recommendations. Currently 8 MiB flash storage is the minimum, with 16+ MiB recommended (for additional functions, user addons, etc.). 64 MiB is the minimum RAM target, with 128+ MiB recommended. According to the router’s wiki page, your chosen router exceeds both recommended requirements. Overall, the router should be suitable for a good while not barring any severe hardware or bootloader-level exploitable vulnerabilities are discovered with the device. There is no explicit date of when your router will no longer be supported, but you can check the history of the supported devices page to get the general trend of when OpenWRT bumps up the minimum requirements. For instance, it was just 4/8+ MiB flash storage and 32/64+ MiB RAM in early 2017.
Depending on what you want to do with the router, getting something with more RAM and a stronger CPU could be beneficial for various tasks (e.g. adblock-fast, cake sqm, etc.). Definitely do research on what you want your router to do though before choosing to go with higher specs or not.
I have a 12 year old Asus router that I use as a managed switch and its still getting openwrt updates
I used OpenWRT and Tomato and a bunch of other forks. I settled on pfsense on a mini PC x86 box because of the community support and great YouTube tutorials.
I’ve got an Asus router and it’s good, however I believe there have been some security concerns around Asus routers being used in botnets afaik. If I were to buy a new router today I would go for a gl.inet router
I bought a Flint 2 last year. I’m very happy with it.
I would expect that the security issues are with the stock OS, but can’t argue with the gl.inet recommendation.
As an alternative to openwrt rather than getting consumer based hardware and flashing. Take a look at mikrotik I’ve been running a $40 wired router for years and it has tons of advanced features that are commercial grade.
They still push out firmware updates for devices first releases decades ago (eg rb433 from 2008. Wireless performance has improved but it’s still not quite there yet, mostly in the area of signal strength. Personally I don’t mind that with the ability to configure things in minute detail (if you want to). Superb hardware reliability and just all round great.
Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
No, they’re really good about supporting old routers for as long as possible. For many years the best router to use with OpenWRT was this one from 2002 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
@rimu @Dust0741 Also, even if openwrt stops supporting it… If you have a router or firewall or something in front of your access point, then running an old version of openwrt isn’t really that much of a risk if we’re talking about residential wifi w/out a lot of coverage.
And that’s assuming you’d want to stick with a model that openwrt has dropped support for. If they do drop support in a few years, you could buy a newer (better supported) older model again for $40.
Maybe the OpenWRT One?
I’ve considered this but only 1 Ethernet port requires a switch, so I’m not really sure
OpenWrt usually supports a device until it’s infeasible or has no maintainers I believe. Beware of small flash!
Personally I recommend getting either a MediaTek Filogic device or one of those x86 boxes. They have the best FOSS support right now and having ARM A53 cores means you can do QoS at fairly good speed. Don’t expect good Wi-Fi if you went with devboards like OpenWrt One.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point PoE Power over Ethernet VPN Virtual Private Network
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #984 for this comm, first seen 6th Jan 2026, 02:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’m going to be a little pedantic, for the sake of completeness, because I very much appreciate and value what Decronym bit did here and want it to cover any gaps that may arise (especially for newcomers).
AP doesn’t necessarily have to be wifi or wireless; I’ve used many hardwired APs. WAP stands for wireless access point, though it’s almost always shorthanded to AP (more so now, maybe, because of a dumbass song with the same name).
“No longer work” is an odd thing.
When you’re talking about open source, something is “supported” as long as someone wants to work on it. I’m pretty sure to an extent there’s still “support” for the original wrt54g.
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