Cambium cnMaestro vs LibreMesh

Cambium cnMaestro manages Cambium wireless and wired network equipment, including enterprise Wi-Fi, switching, fixed wireless broadband, and industrial IoT products. It provides network control, device visibility, and zero-touch provisioning through cloud-based or on-premises deployment. Cambium says it can run in a public cloud, private cloud, or on premises without Wi-Fi controllers; the on-premises edition is a standalone virtual machine for data-center installation. Management tools include network hierarchy, ping and traceroute troubleshooting, ePSK generation, guest portal management, email alerts, and rogue access point detection. The free cnMaestro Essentials plan requires no subscription and supports up to 10,000 devices and 10 management users. cnMaestro X has a 90-day free trial and 1-, 3-, or 5-year subscriptions priced by device tier and required device counts, with purchase through an authorized reseller or distributor. X includes Cambium Care Pro support, software updates, hardware diagnosis assistance, and accelerated access to Level 2 and Level 3 engineers. APIs use HTTPS, JSON, and OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials Grant; REST APIs and webhooks can send alarms to external servers.

LibreMesh is a free, modular framework for creating OpenWrt-based firmware for wireless mesh nodes. It is intended for decentralized, community-run networks and is available for self-hosted and web deployment. The code provides defaults for Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced, BMX7 and OLSR. Its default design combines BATMAN-adv at layer 2 with Babel at layer 3 for roaming and network segmentation. A default flavor is described as working without manual configuration, while the project aims to support setup through a smartphone-usable web interface. Users can request customized builds through the online ImageBuilder, build on a host or use archived precompiled releases. Recommended hardware has at least 16 MB flash and 128 MB RAM, although installation is possible on 8/64 MB routers. Configuration uses OpenWrt UCI or manual editing. The software can be used, copied, modified and distributed under AGPL. The project advises customizing builds to preserve space and RAM and warns against direct package upgrades.