I have been 'playing around' with mikrotik for a few years, mainly at home. In this time it sparked enough curiosity topursue it more.
In the past year and a bit i have taken them more seriously and spent alot of time learning them more and have started deploying them in alot of my customer sites.
My opinions/discoveries so far:
1. Excellent value - there's nothing at their pricepoint that has the capabilities these RB's have
2. Poor Communication - Bugs and Changelogs aren't communicated well, Mikrotik have a great community presence but are selectively quiet sometimes
3. Somewhat complex config - This isn't really a bad thing, but it does ward off alot of potential customers for mikrotik
Usage Observations:
1. RB as a appliance - The firewall is extremely powerful and i have used it in many loadbalancing projects successfully.
2. RB as a business access point - Deployed in many small businesses, again the best value vs. capabilities but unfortunately looses
out in large corporate for smarter AP's that operate in a lightweight configuration or have
3. RB as a firewall - great, works well but for some may be a steep learning curve. If you're coming from IPTables this most likely wont be the case
4. RB User interface (Winbox and Webfig) - Feedback from my peers is that its not that good for people coming in from most other Router or Firewall vendors, this hasn't bothered me and i actually like winbox quite alot now.
5. RB for VPN - Fairly average, IPSec unfortunately doesn't play well with other vendor devices and is slightly odd to configure the first few times around. Some odd irregularities have come up (like a roadwarrior setup that decides to lose its SA's) that have pushed me to other vendors for some projects.
6. RB for QoS - I'm still undecided on this one, from what i read it is extremely powerful and i have set it up a few times. I'm not really sold on it 100% yet but i hope that it is just due to my understanding.
7. RB for SMB/SoHo - I see Mikrotik aiming alot for this space but there are a few things holding them back from what i can see. One is the lack of DSL modems, bridging works well but means another device for the end user. WiFi doesn't seem to hold up to media rich applications as well as other vendors, it may have only been the RB751 models i used but still none the less was a roadblock. They will also need to pay attention to VoIP a bit more to be successful in this space also.
8. RB for Wireless (PtP-PtMP)- I believe this is almost where Mikrotik started, I have not had the chance to really use all of its potential here but there are many on the forums who have created businesses out of Mikrotik so i'm sure it is a great product.
9. RB for Switching - I saw potential with this to get a share of the market that would have a use for a cheap smart switch however this has seemingly died all together. SwOS has a terribly basic featureset, there's alot of potential here but they'd need to provide much higher density models, PoE and a revised OS before I could put them out in the wild.
All in all i like them very much and i've decided to get some of their certifications