Good plug and play router?

[PandaBear]

I think if you don't want to deal with it, the most important thing is the range and throughput. In such case assume you have a big house and you want speed all over, then a router with multiple bands (those that support 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz, and 3+ antennas) would be ideal. This is likely in the Wifi 6e or Wifi 7 class.

If you have money to spare do a speed test from every part of your home and see if you have spots where reception is bad, and can add a mesh extender. So, I guess you should buy a router that support mesh to start with and add a mesh extender here and there as needed.

I like many different brands, I use TP Link mostly because they are cheap but if you want a Taiwan or US brand then TP Link is not one.

 

[OVERKILL]

Does either the Asus or Unifi come with a firewall? Or is that old news and replaced with something better?

Yes, the Unifi router has a very configurable firewall, IDS, IPS and content filtering. Here's a shot from my UDM:

 

[97prizm]

Hi guys, I am now in the market for a new router - I'd like to keep the cost to less than $200 if possible and don't really want to have to use my phone and an app to configure the silly thing and I'll admit that I've fallen behind the times and am no longer familiar with the features that modern router should have.

I was looking on the Jungle Site and found some Cisco routers but many of them are "integrated services" - is that a router that also acts as a modem? I had seen some recommendations here in old threads to get a Netgear Nighthawk, but after having read the reviews on one model, it looked like it was difficult to set up (app) and flaky, which makes me want to steer clear of them.

TP Link. I has an app option but I used the step-by-step online setup and it was easy and fast, plus has easy software updates.