Reader's Choice Awards 2020: Routers and Network Attached Storage

In this crazy time we're living through, the internet is the only means by which many of us interact with the outside world. We're working and learning from home; keeping in touch with family, friends, and colleagues over Zoom and other video conferencing tools; and watching streaming video services to pass the time. All these activities require a fast, reliable, and secure internet connection.

Besides your ISP, the most important aspect of that connection is your router. But that's only one aspect of this survey. We also asked our readers to rate their network attached storage (NAS) devices, which provide a shared space for storing and sharing photos, music and videos, as well as backing up PCs and other devices. Read on to see which ones your fellow readers recommend and which you should avoid.

Routers for 2020

READERS' CHOICE WINNER
Standard Router: Asus
For nearly a decade, Asus has been PCMag readers' router brand of choice. The company continues to get high marks for delivering reliable and easy-to-use devices that set it apart from the competition.

READERS' CHOICE WINNER
Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi System: Google
Mesh network routers can help solve the problem of delivering Wi-Fi across a large space and for the last three years, PCMag readers have told us that no one is doing mesh better than Google.

There are three types of routers most people use to wirelessly share their internet connection in their home: Standalone wireless routers generally provide enough coverage for smaller houses and apartments. Mesh network routers use multiple pods placed strategically throughout your home to provide one seamless wireless network across a larger space. Lastly, hybrid modems / routers, which are often provided by your ISP, combine a router (sometimes mesh) with a broadband modem in a single device.

Half of our respondents wirelessly share their internet connection with a standalone router and their brand of choice is Asus, which wins our PCMag Readers' Choice Award for standalone routers for the ninth straight year.

With almost a decade of top honors, we weren't surprised to see comments from Asus users like, "Has always worked great for me. Never have had issues. Supplies great speed through multiple connections." Asus received an overall satisfaction rating of 8.9 this year, down somewhat from last year's 9.1 but still excellent and far ahead of its competition. (Respondents rate satisfaction on a scale from 0 for extremely dissatisfied to 10 for extremely satisfied.) The next closest company in overall satisfaction was TP-Link, which received an 8.5.

Asus doesn't make the least expensive routers; that showed in its rating for satisfaction with cost/value, where it only received an 8.2 compared to TP-Link's 8.6. However, Asus earned the highest satisfaction ratings on every other measure including satisfaction with reliability (9.0), ease of use (8.9), setup (8.8), technical support (7.9), and likelihood to recommend (8.8). It was good to see that all of the standalone router brands rated well for satisfaction with setup. Linksys also had an 8.8 on this measure while Netgear was right behind at 8.7, followed by TP-Link's 8.6.

Mesh network routers are only used by a quarter of our respondents, but they're growing in popularity. Thirty-one percent of the routers purchased by respondents within the last year were mesh systems, compared to just 11 percent of routers that were three or more years old. Google, whose mesh system is now called Nest Wifi, wins our Readers' Choice Award for mesh network routers for the third straight year.

The mesh network router brands' overall satisfaction ratings fell in a very tight range. The winner, Google, received an 8.7, as did Netgear. Asus and Linksys were right behind at 8.6. However, things weren't nearly as close when we looked at likelihood to recommend, a key measure of satisfaction. Google received an 8.9, compared to 8.6 for Asus and Netgear and 8.1 for Linksys. In fact, Google had top marks on every measure in which it received at least the requisite minimum of responses.

One last note: We had to share this comment from one of the Google respondents. "Just playing around, I've been able to stream 4 movies from my Wi-Fi-connected Plex server out to 4 Roku-enabled TVs at the same time with no evidence of buffering or dropouts." That's the spirit we like to see!

Below is the full table of results for Readers' Choice 2020: Routers.

Network Attached Storage for 2020

READERS' CHOICE WINNER
Synology
Synology continues to deliver at a much higher level than any of its competitors, winning our Readers' Choice Award for the ninth straight year.

Not everyone is ready to entrust their whole life to "the cloud". A network attached storage (NAS) device gives you a way to store your movies, music and photos on your home network and make them available to all the devices in your home. You can also get to your files from anywhere that you have an internet connection and you can share your files with friends and family. Lastly, NAS devices help you handle the very important task of backing up your computers.

If you've been reading our survey results since we first started asking about NAS devices in 2012, you can probably guess our Readers' Choice Award winner: It's Synology, the company that has been the top choice every single year. Synology received the highest satisfaction ratings on every measure and in most cases, it beat its competition by a substantial margin. Aside from satisfaction with cost/value (in which it was tied with Seagate with a rating of 8.5) Synology's satisfaction ratings were always at least half a point higher than its competition.

Synology received ratings over 9.0 on several measures which is the mark of a highly satisfying product. Overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend both rated 9.1 while satisfaction with reliability came in at 9.4.

Readers praised all aspects of their Synology NAS devices, including helping you become your own personal cloud service provider. This reader summed up Synology's value proposition quite well, "They have viable alternatives to Google Photos or other cloud services if you want to get away from cloud providers. Also, they update their devices frequently and are on top of security alerts and customer needs. I am really impressed with this product."

If you're in the market for a NAS device, also consider that your home networking router may also be able work as a NAS when paired with the appropriate hard drives. Nearly a third of our Asus respondents (31 percent) and just over twenty percent of our Linksys and Netgear respondents use the NAS features on their routers. While none of the routers received NAS ratings comparable to Synology, they were on par with Synology's competitors.

Below is the full table of results for Readers' Choice 2020: Network Attached Storage.

The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for Routers and Network Attached Storage was in the field from March 9, 2020, through March 30, 2020. For more information on how the survey is conducted, read the survey methodology.

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