What do you like best about the product?

Vyos is my go-to for router/firewall distributions. It's pretty much a swiss army knife of router/firewalls thanks to the extensive feature list.

Vyos is a highly versatile networking solution that can be deployed on a range of hardware, from low-powered mini PCs for basic home routing to high-performance enterprise servers and virtual machines. This flexibility allows it to cater to a wide variety of users, regardless of their environment or specific needs.

Vyos supports advanced routing topologies and a comprehensive range of routing protocols. It also offers robust VPN support, including protocols like WireGuard, IPSec, and OpenVPN.

Recent versions have integrated HAProxy, which has proven to be extremely useful. The firewall configuration is intuitive, easy to manage, and effective.

By far, the command-line interface is my favourite feature of Vyos. It makes setting up firewall rules, NAT rules, QoS rules, site-to-site, or roadwarrior VPNs extremely easy to implement. I haven't seen any other router/firewall distribution with such a versatile and easy-to-use command-line interface.

Vyos also has an API which can be used to configure Vyos using tools like Terraform or Ansible.

The documentation is generally excellent, featuring many examples. While some sections may occasionally be slightly out of date, it’s usually easy to adapt them to newer versions with minor command adjustments.

I haven't had to talk to customer support directly, but I have reported bugs via their bug tracker, all of which have been promptly resolved.

What do you dislike about the product?

I can't really think of anything I dislike about VyOS. I've been able to do everything I've wanted to do in VyOS pretty easily.

If I had to be extremely picky the only thing I would say is, even though there is VyOS Stream coming soon, it would be nice if there were something like a lower cost home user/self-service/hobbyist license option to get access to the normal LTS release. Though with Stream coming soon, and with the nightly builds being pretty stable it's not a massive concern, just something that might be a good option as some users (including me!) would prefer to run LTS at home to match what we have in our "production" environments.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I've used VyOS in a varity of different scenarios.
I've used Vyos as a router/firewall for a small business network, and I also used it at home for my personal router, and also my parents home router.

I have also used it to configure site-to-site VPNs between various cloud providers.

Currently my favourite use case has been to bypass CGNAT by using the built in HAProxy function to proxy traffic over a Wireguard tunnel just because how easy the configuration is.