Flint 2 Review: Very Good, With Caveats
Our full Flint 2 review after two weeks of testing: measured performance, battery figures, and whether it is worth £139.
Priya Raghunathan
Where it lands
The Flint 2 is GL.iNet's 2023 entry in a crowded networking Gear market, and at £139 it is competing against some of the strongest hardware we have tested. After a fortnight of daily use, the headline is straightforward: it delivers openWrt underneath, so it does whatever you can configure.
Verdict in one line: Buy it for openWrt underneath, so it does whatever you can configure. Think twice if this would bother you daily: the stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer.
Build and materials
There is nothing experimental here, which is mostly to the Flint 2's credit. The detail worth calling out is that WireGuard throughput was four times what the Asus managed. Against the rest of the networking Gear category it feels considered rather than novel.
What it can do
Our testing runs the same suite on every device so figures stay comparable across years. The figure worth quoting is Setup time: 10 minutes. That places it comfortably above average for its price bracket.
| Specification | Flint 2 |
|---|---|
| Standard | Wi-Fi 6 dual-band |
| Throughput | 880Mbps at 5m, 270Mbps at 20m |
| Ports | 2x 2.5GbE, 4x GbE |
| Coverage | 160m² single unit |
| Backhaul | OpenWrt mesh |
| Setup time | 10 minutes |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks carrying the whole household, with the previous router boxed. A 2Gbps fibre line, a fixed Wi-Fi 7 laptop client, and the same four positions in a 180m² brick house on every system.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Throughput at 5m | iperf3 for five minutes, same room, line of sight, averaged across three runs. |
| Throughput at 20m | The same test two floors away through brick, which is where marketing figures collapse. |
| Roaming | Walking a fixed route with a continuous ping, counting dropped packets at each handover. |
| Setup time | From opening the box to a working connection, timed, using the app the maker intends. |
| Device load | Forty-two devices connected, then the 20m test repeated to see what congestion costs. |
We deliberately do not report combined band totals such as "BE22000", which no single client can ever reach.
The honest caveat: Every figure here is specific to one brick house. Timber-framed homes will see materially better range.
What it does well
- OpenWrt underneath, so it does whatever you can configure
- Built-in WireGuard that actually reaches 500Mbps
- Two 2.5GbE ports at £139
Taken together, those strengths make it a natural fit for tinkerers, and anyone who wants a fast VPN at the router.
The compromises
- The stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer
- No 6GHz
- Support is community-led rather than official
None of these are dealbreakers on their own. Whether they matter depends entirely on how you intend to use it, which is why the section below matters more than the score.
How it compares
The closest alternatives on price are eero 6+ and UniFi Express. All three have been through the same tests, so the figures below are directly comparable rather than collected from different reviews.
| Model | Price | Our score | Standout | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flint 2 (this review) | £139 | 4 / 5 | OpenWrt underneath, so it does whatever you can configure | The stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer |
| eero 6+ | £139 | 3 / 5 | The cheapest way into a mesh that actually roams properly | A shared backhaul halves throughput on the far node |
| UniFi Express | £149 | 4 / 5 | A full UniFi controller in a £149 box, which used to cost four times that | Wi-Fi 6 rather than 6E or 7 |
Nothing at this price scored higher in our testing, which is the strongest argument for the Flint 2.
Is it worth the money?
At £139 the Flint 2 undercuts the category average of £395 by £256, against an average score of 3.8 out of 5 across the networking Gear we have tested. Its own 4 works out at roughly £35 per point. That is the straightforward case: above-average result, below-average price.
If the budget is the binding constraint, the Flint 2 at £139 is the floor we would still recommend — below that the compromises stop being ones you can live with.
Living with it
Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was standard — Wi-Fi 6 dual-band is more than adequate and you forget about it by the third day. What kept surfacing instead was that the stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer, which is easy to shrug off in a spec comparison and harder to ignore at 6pm on a Friday. On the other side, WireGuard throughput was four times what the Asus managed turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.
Who it suits
Buy the Flint 2 if you are tinkerers, and anyone who wants a fast VPN at the router. Skip it if this is something you would notice every day: the stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer.
Buy it if:
- Tinkerers, and anyone who wants a fast VPN at the router
- You want openWrt underneath, so it does whatever you can configure
- You value built-in WireGuard that actually reaches 500Mbps
Skip it if:
- You need stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer to be a solved problem
- The eero 6+ at £139 already covers what you need
- You upgraded within the last two years — the gap is not worth the outlay
Verdict
Buy it for openWrt underneath, so it does whatever you can configure. Think twice if this would bother you daily: the stock interface hides most of OpenWrt behind a simplified layer.
Score: 4 / 5 · £139 at the time of writing.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the networking we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Flint 2: A Smart Device Will Not Join the Network and Flint 2: Devices Will Not Stay Connected to the Mesh.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
