As title.
Looking at Gi Net AR750 and Mango, and seeing similar looking devices that are unbranded on AliExpress etc.
Nanopi r2s is appearing lots with a Mango case in the photo. Misdirection?
To be honest, I am looking for the AR750 that is unbranded so I can deploy 50-100 with my own firmware. Would love to put my own branding on.
Thanks.
Both can come in visually very similar squeaky yellow cases, the Mango has the (plastic) ethernet ports on the left side, and the R2S has the (metal) ethernet ports on the right.
You could be forgiven to mix them up, and Aliexpress sellers apparantly do, too.
Yes in most cases it's piggybacking on GL-Inet success, by using the same OEM case or a similar one.
All GL-inet mini routers have no heatsink and don't use a whole lot of power, see this for example is a board image of AR750 https://docs.gl-inet.com/en/3/specification/gl-ar750s/
and this is the mango https://docs.gl-inet.com/en/3/specification/gl-mt300n-v2/
You can look at the other hardware specs of their minirouters from that site, which is official GL-Inet docs.
Nanopi r2s is hot as the surface of the Sun and will throttle in the yellow Mango-like case because it limits airflow. If you want smooth use you must get the black aluminum case (that doubles as heatsink). See the temperature tests from the manufacturer themselves (scroll down a bit https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=282 )
But it's not "worse", it's just a different target. It has a much more powerful CPU than the other two GL Inet mini routers, and afaik has no wifi onboard. It is more of a mini server, that competes with Raspberry Pi.
Since you want a large-ish order of customized minirouters why not ask GL-Inet directly? They have a businness contact form too for these things, https://www.gl-inet.com/business/#contact-us
They might not be as cheap as buying random stuff from aliexpress, but you are dealing with an OEM that knows what they are doing, has decent docs, discloses sources of their firmware and speaks english.
Please don't mix nanos with mangos 
While looking almost identical from the outside the difference can't be bigger from the inside.
To cap it short: the nanopi r2s is much (much!) beefier (4-core, 1.3GHz, 1gig ram) and also capable of running "full fledged" Linux distributions but the device is surely mainly focused on networking (no video out etc.).
Many many thanks for the replies.
It did appear that the specs were different, but the AliExpress sellers using the Mango cases trying to capitalise on the success.
Built my own openwrt (very stripped, with FRR & wireguard) and works well on the GL-AR300M... in time, I'll test the NanoPi, but for the minute, openwrt works really, really well.
I do like the GUI of the GL stuff, but I fear there is too much bloatware and unsure about my level of trust if I deployed in a semi-enterprise environment.
If openwrt (on a "normal" lower spec device) does the job for you the nano pi will be probably overpowered by factor 10 or more. Can't really think of a "normal" use case utilizing 1 gig of ram or even only one (of the four) 1.3GHz cores.