Hello everyone,

I'm new to this forum.  I hope my post does not raise anyone's ire as "old and seen before."  I've been reading but didn't come across direct comparisons between OpenWRT and DD-WRT.  Could someone point me to a comparison document?  But I would like to get a feeling for which software is easier to work with, most stable, etc. along with a reasonable comparison of feature (it doesn't have to be all inclusive or overly deep at this point for me).  Nevertheless, technical explanations are fine. 

I have a Linksys WRT54GS router that I would like to flash with open source firmware.  I don't need to do anything fancy right now. 

Many thanks....

Don't know of a document, but in brief, dd-wrt provides limited functionality in an easy-to-install and easy-to-configure way, so if what you want to do is covered by dd-wrt, then it will probably serve you well.  OpenWrt has hundreds of packages which can be installed, so you can do things which cannot be as easily done with dd-wrt, if they can be done at all.  Your choice may be guided by what you want to do.

I, for instance, have used dd-wrt to have a vpn router.  It can be done with openWrt, and many have succeeded, but (a couple of years ago) I did not after some struggle, and dd-wrt worked easily.  On the other hand, I have a couple of dozen devices running openWrt, operating an over-the-net pan and tilt webcam, control of my boiler zones, media player, and (mostly) temperature and home monitoring sensors.  For almost any home automation task I would use openWrt to talk through usb/serial to a microprocessor (picaxe in my case).

Actual router stuff is not my area, but openWrt has a great deal of flexibility.

(Last edited by lizby on 26 May 2013, 19:35)

Thank you, lizby.  This information helps a lot.

Right now my most pressing need is to be able to connect to a DDNS service.  I want to remotely monitor my security camera DVR over the Internet -- not on the local net. 

However, I think it's worthwhile adopting openWRT based on your input because I will most likely want to do many more advanced things in the future.  Given that we all have limited time, I prefer to learn one product and stick with it! 

Thanks again for the info....

*I* had lots of problems with DD-WRT and in particular DDNS using the supplied Webgui.

It seemed that I needed a snapshot version of DD-WRT rather than a release because I was using newish hardware, although now my hardware isn't that new any more.
Also *my* experience with DD-WRT was that it is stuck in an endless development cycle with very few supported releases.
New versions of upstream sources are constantly being merged with as result that each new build fixes some things but breaks others.
Again, this was *my* experience.

My experience with OpenWRT (which am now using on two identical Netgear WNDR3700v1 routers) is that they make more regular releases which work better, so it seems to me that at least the QA is better.

On the other hand, DD-WRT apparently supports some NAND-flash devices which OpenWRT doesn't yet.

In summary, since you need DDNS support, *I* would go for OpenWRT based on *my* experiences.

Cheers,

Colin

I had many problems with DDWRT too and that is why i switched to OpenWRT. The wireless drivers (TP-Link TLWR1043ND) were unstable, causing the wifi to reset frequently. With OpenWRT 12.09 (and before with 12.09rc1) these issues have gone away.