If you’ve made it to this page, it’s possibly due to me suggesting that your router is not all that great - but what makes a router good?

Generally, a good router has the connectivity, capability, flexibility, and usability that let you do the things you want to do.

Connectivity can refer to the speed and number of WAN and LAN connections. If you have an Internet connection that’s faster than your router can support, that’s not great. Same for your LAN. Plus, if you have multiple Internet connections, having a router that can’t use them just isn’t helpful.

Capability can refer to individual features. Some routers let you host VLANs, DNS filtering, a VPN server, a firewall, and tons of other cool stuff.

Flexibility broadly refers to how useful those features really are. For example, a firewall may be a feature in name only, if the rule creation and rule engine are terrible.

Usability is what it sounds like. All of the capability and flexibility in the world don’t really help much, if you can’t figure out how to use it. This could be something as simple as a GUI, instead of a CLI interface. This is a pretty subjective category.