Compared with UniFi and RouterOS#

What Wheelhouse does not attempt#

Say this first, because it is the reason many readers should stop here.

• It is not a wireless controller. There is no access-point management, no roaming, no SSID configuration and no plan to add them. VyOS can configure interfaces wireless from its CLI; Wheelhouse has no page for it and the installer does not offer it. Put an access point behind the router and manage it with whatever manages it today.
• It is not a switch manager. LLDP will tell you what switch you are plugged into. That is the whole of the integration.
• It has no mobile application, no cloud console and no remote-access relay. The management interface is on the router, on port 8443, and reaching it from outside is your VPN's job.

If a single pane of glass across routers, switches and access points is what you are buying, UniFi is the product that does that and this one is not.

Compared with UniFi#

UniFi's controller is the point of it: one interface across the whole estate, sensible defaults, and a model that hides the details on purpose. That is a real design goal and it serves a large number of people well.

The trade is the one you already know if you have gone looking for a knob that is not exposed. There is a configuration underneath and you are not meant to be in it; when the interface does not offer something, the answer is often that there is no answer.

Wheelhouse takes the opposite position on the same axis. The configuration model is not hidden, and you do not have to know it to use it. Every setting has a form, every change is reviewed as a sentence and applied as one transaction, and Advanced mode puts the set lines behind each change and the whole configuration tree, browsable and searchable, on screen. The console is a supported way to work.

That is worse if you want the details gone entirely and better if you have ever needed them.

Compared with RouterOS#

RouterOS is closer in spirit: dense, complete, and unembarrassed about exposing what the router does. Winbox gives you as much control as anything on this page.

Two differences.

The configuration model. RouterOS applies a change when you make it, and its answer to the change that cuts you off is Safe Mode: work inside a safe-mode session and the router undoes what you did if the session drops. That is a real mechanism, and it is not the one being claimed here.

Two things differ. Wheelhouse's changes accumulate in one list across every page and are applied as a single transaction, each one listed as a sentence before any of it runs. And commit-confirm is not scoped to your session: it is the configuration backend's own timer, so the router restarts with its saved configuration whether or not anyone is still connected, and whether the change came from the interface, the API or the console.

The interface assumes less. RouterOS is famously unforgiving to a newcomer, and much of the knowledge is in forum posts rather than in the interface. Wheelhouse's forms name each setting in words and check each value where it is typed, an empty page offers the button that adds what is missing, and every change is said in a sentence before it is applied — so the interface is not a test of whether you already know the model. Advanced mode shows the model itself when you want to learn it.

Where RouterOS is ahead: it runs on hardware you can buy today, from a company that has been shipping for two decades, with a driver and platform matrix Wheelhouse cannot begin to match. Wheelhouse is amd64 only, has no compatibility list, and has only ever been installed on one physical machine.

Where Wheelhouse suits a small team#

The case is narrow. A team of two to ten people running a handful of sites, who want:

• real routing protocols — BGP and OSPF through FRR, not a plugin;
• configuration as data, with a diff, a revision history and a desired-state file;
• single sign-on with group-to-role mapping and an attributed audit trail, so "who changed the NAT rule" has an answer — hash-chained, and copied to a syslog collector as it is written once you have configured one;
• an API the interface itself consumes, so automation is not reverse engineering;
• no per-seat pricing.

Read on#

• Why Wheelhouse — the trade-off in general.
• Pricing — what a subscription gates.
• What is finished, and what is not.
• The parity matrix — the eight rows where Wheelhouse loses today.