The MikroTik RB5009 has impressed me from the very first day. Although small in size, it is incredibly powerful and stable. I use it quite "heavily," with containers like Pi-hole, LibreSpeed server, as well as WireGuard VPNs, and everything runs perfectly without any hiccups.

In practice, no matter how hard I tried, the CPU reached at most 55%, which shows how efficient its hardware is.

What the machine does has been said by others.
5 stars easily from me.
.
I will only mention what I did and what I couldn't do with other routers (DrayTek) costing €150.
1) Extremely fast in gaming and with excellent QoS setup for bufferbloat. I see pings that my line has never seen before, and at the same time, I can do a speed test without any load of even 1ms.
2) Full compatibility even with the tricky FTTH from Nova. I have completely eliminated the provider's equipment, and still, I have internet, telephony (via ATA), and softphone on Windows.
3) Full CLI support. I can automate whatever I want (e.g., Wake-On-Lan).
4) I can have my setup not only in binary but also in text format so I can replicate my settings in the future and check what has changed since the last time.
.
Yes, it is harder to set up, but if you can't do it yourself, it's worth giving €50 to a technician to set it up for you.
.
P.S.
My only complaint is that MikroTik refuses to implement broadcast relay between different VLANs. This is not an issue with this specific model but a broader philosophical issue with MikroTik. I bypassed this by adding an ERX to the network just to do this job.

The machine is simply very powerful. We got it at a beach bar with a lot of people from the beginning of summer, it worked perfectly and didn't get stuck at all. Extremely satisfied as in its previous case (I had an older model). Of course, you need to deal with the technical part, otherwise, it's better to have a technician set it up for you, but this obviously happens with every device! I recommend it!

My first contact with MikroTik and RouterOS. I will repeat what applies to all MikroTik products, it is a very big school and it puts you abruptly in the world of networks, it requires a lot of reading and involvement to set it up, good contact with the terminal, although there is also the WinBox application which can run with Wine and on non-Windows Operating Systems.

I have had it for about a month and I have managed the following:
1. Set up VLANs in the network to separate traffic between smart devices (smart switches, washing machines, etc.), the standard network of personal devices, and some corporate servers and laptops, in collaboration with some managed switches.
2. Put the provider's router in bridge mode and make the pppoe connection through the Mikrotik.
3. Reduce bufferbloat from rank D to A directly with the installation of Mikrotik, and then to A+ by enabling SFQ queues. Now the line does not "clog" no matter what happens simultaneously, with downloading, multiple streaming, and the ping remains low at 3-10ms.
4. Wireguard VPN connection to a known VPN provider, with routing rules that send only the traffic from specific devices (e.g. Smart TV) to a secondary routing table for wireguard traffic, in combination with firewall rules that block ipv6 traffic and assign specific DNS servers of the VPN provider to avoid DNS leaks.
5. Setting up a LAG group with 4 ethernet connections between the Mikrotik and the central switch, in order to have traffic balancing and not create a bottleneck for the entire network through 1 ethernet connection.

Things I am working on and have not yet managed to set up correctly:
1. Load Balancing between the fiber optic router and another router with a 4G connection that does not support bridge mode.
2. Using the VPN tunnel only for traffic to specific hostnames/websites - maintaining a dynamic list of IP addresses that resolve to those specific hostnames through a script that runs periodically.

In general, it has a very sturdy construction, does not heat up much, does not make noise, and has very good specs both in computing power and in the number of connections it supports. It is highly recommended for power users who want to upgrade their network and have absolute control over their traffic.