Which of these has the most owner feedback behind it?
The GL.iNet Flint 2, by a wide margin, at 44% recommend from 78 owners. The rest are thinly covered: the eero Pro 7 sits at 67% from 12 owners, the TP-Link Deco BE63 at 50% from 6, the Deco XE75 at 44% from 9, and the NETGEAR Orbi 870 at 22% from 9. The eero's rate is the highest in the category, but 12 owners is not enough to treat as settled, so the gap between it and the Deco kits is smaller than the numbers suggest.
Is the eero Pro 7 worth the money?
The owners who have reported back mostly say yes on performance, at 67% recommend from 12 owners, describing reliable mesh behavior, strong whole-home coverage, and a clear speed lift with newer devices. The objections are about what the price buys. Basic features sit behind a subscription, there are only two Ethernet ports per unit, and settings live in the phone app rather than a web interface. Anyone who wants deep manual control or plenty of wired ports will find that limiting.
Do these systems need a wired backhaul?
The Orbi 870 effectively does. Owners describe the wireless backhaul as unreliable, and most of the people who got the system behaving credit running Ethernet between the router and satellite, which is a large part of why it sits at 22% recommend from 9 owners alongside satellite dropouts, a buggy management interface, and RMAs. Wiring is not automatically the fix elsewhere, though: Deco XE75 owners report satellites refusing to link over certain switches and cabling, while Deco BE63 owners measured very little latency difference between wired and wireless backhaul when the system was running cleanly.
What goes wrong with the GL.iNet Flint 2?
Firmware. Owners repeatedly name 4.8.4 and the 4.9.x line as the point where Wi-Fi speed and range fall off sharply, traced to a transmit power or country code bug, and many roll back to 4.8.3 to get performance back. A smaller group finds GL.iNet's take on OpenWRT harder to configure than stock, with VLANs the usual sticking point and support unable to resolve some cases. Coverage in larger or multi-floor homes also disappoints some owners separately from the firmware trouble. The upside owners keep citing is hardware value, heavy loads like WireGuard plus AdGuard Home plus SQM handled at once, and the option to flash vanilla OpenWRT.
Deco BE63 or Deco XE75?
Both have thin owner feedback and the same failure pattern, so the choice is mostly about generation and price. The BE63 is the Wi-Fi 7 kit at 50% recommend from 6 owners, with reports of 800 to 1000mbps over 5GHz and easy setup on one side, and satellites showing as not connected or throwing repeated connection failures on the other. The XE75 is the older 6E kit at 44% from 9 owners, praised for near line rate speeds, multi-story coverage, and clean access point operation, but tripped up by random drops and reboots, fussy wired backhaul, thin advanced controls, and firmware updates that sometimes make things worse.
