Banana Pi BPI-R4
Shares rank 12 of 15 routers by recommenders
People recommend it as a 10G router board with hardware-accelerated networking, suited to PPPoE links and simple router, firewall and DNS setups.
People recommend it as a 10G router board with hardware-accelerated networking, suited to PPPoE links and simple router, firewall and DNS setups.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Hardware acceleration for networking
“The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it.”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025” “it has excellent hw acceleration for networking tasks”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router” Near 10 gigabit routing speed
“The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it.”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025” “can easily route traffic at near 10 gigabit wire speed”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit”
Other routers people recommend
The four most recommended other routers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MikroTik router | 59 | 26 | 69% | 11 | 10 yrs6 owners | Approved |
| GL.iNet travel router | 54 | 5 | 92% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Ubiquiti UniFi Travel Router | 35 | 16 | 69% | 2 | — | — |
| OpenWrt One | 34 | 10 | 77% | 7 | 3 mo3 owners | Approved |
| Banana Pi BPI-R4This page | 6 | 3 | 67% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
All 10 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“can easily route traffic at near 10 gigabit wire speed”
“you'd have a near completely open ISM band SDR platform right there”
“Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux”
“they managed to burn a lot of customers in regards to the add-on wifi 7 module”
“it has excellent hw acceleration for networking tasks”
“it's a solid choice for a simple router/firewall/DNS/DHCP box”
“I think there's a huge hole in the market for consumer-minded routers that run hardware like the Banana Pi R4”
“open source routers provides enough transparency to effectively eliminate spyware threats”
“A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform”
“The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.