DDWRT or Tomato

[MasterChief]

Has anyone got experience with either firmwares?

I thinking of buying a router capable of running custom firmware, my current dlink router is rubbish. It crashes almost every day and doesn’t do half of what the DDWRT and Tomato firmwares can.

Stability is a must, I just want to configure the router then never have to touch it again. I would also like the router to run an SSH server and support USB devices if possible.

Both firmwares look to do exactly what I want so I don’t really know which one to go with, Tomato looks a lot more polished than DDWRT, but DDWRT looks to support more hardware so should be easier getting a router that can run it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_(firmware)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddwrt

 

[Titcher]

Never used tomato myself. But I can definitely recommend DD-WRT, never had any troubles with it and it's always been able to do whatever I throw at it, including a few bonus features like bandwidth logs and VPN support.

 

[Nimrod]

iIve seen both before, but only used DD-WRT extensivily.

Tomato without a doubt has a nicer and more polished GUI, and Insanenutter will most likely post on this shortly supporting it as I know he switched from DD-WRT to Tomato.

However DD-WRT like you said supports more devices, has tons of features and a big community and wiki available to help. I *believe* DD-WRT supports more stuff than Tomato, but its properly unlikely your need its advanced features.

I'd recommend DD-WRT myself due to no other reason than I know it works and will meet your requirements, I have it on 3 routers, and it works perfectly and is stable for months at a time. My one at home got to around 170 days of uptime till a power cut happened. Other than that, sorry I cant explain the differences more.


Edit: From Googling it up, the general comparasion seems to be Tomato is easy to use and has the features most people need, however DD-WRT has more features if you need them / know how to use them and better documentation.

 

[InsaneNutter]

I have used both, whichever one you decide to go with you will defiantly find it better than the stock firmware that ships with any router.

I used DDWRT for a year and found it to be a massive improvement over the stock firmware on my Linksys WRT54g. I then switched to Tomato and never looked back, at the time Tomato was the only firmware that could monitor your bandwidth usage and produced some very nice graphs and statistics about your internet usage. I think DDWRT can also do this now too.

I notice you mention USB support, this is where Tomato really does shine.
You can share usb drives or printers from the routers USB port by clicking a few options in the routers webui, your router can also act as a samba server as well as an FTP server making it a good, cheap little nas.

I think DDWRT can do this also but it requires a lot of hacking about in the command line and can be quite buggy from what I hear.

Unless you want multiple VLAN’s or SSID’s for your wireless network Tomato would probably be best for you to use on a home network, especially as you want usb. Most of the features DDWRT offers over Tamato would most likely only be of use in a workplace environment.

 

[MasterChief]

Thanks for all the advice guys.

Can I ask what routers you are all running DDWRT and Tomato on?

It looks like Tomato would be better for my needs, especially with the USB build of it.

Just have to find a router which will run custom firmware now.

 

[z3ddrocksz]

I've never used tomato, but when I got my Linksys WRT54G2 for free (newb at the register!) I installed DDWRT as a bridge for my laptop and for my xbox. I've really never had to touch the settings and it runs perfectly fine for me. Only downside is that it was hard to install and configure since the WRT54G2 isn't officialy supported I had to ftp it to the router. Also I was using 2 sets of instructions which threw me off. But if you are going to get a good router for CFW I would recommend the WRT54G (original not 2). But you can use whichever will be best for you.

-Nelson

 

[InsaneNutter]

I have an old Linksys WRT54g from 2003 running Tomato.

I also have an ASUS WL-520GU, this has a USB port - got this from eBay My World - fp-outlet on ebay, just orderd another for a friend too. Great router.

 

[Titcher]

I'm using a Linksys WRT54GSv4, slightly smaller flash space so I can't use the bigger dd-wrt builds. My router came with OpenWRT originally anyway(was a FON router) so was really easy to flash. Speaking of FON actually, you might be able to get a good deal on a fonera, which support DD-Wrt and I imagine tomato too. My models and models like it support USB via a quick mod apparently.