Eero Max 7 vs Asus RT-BE88U: Is the 2024 Model Worth the Change?
Eero Max 7 or Asus RT-BE88U? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Aisha Bello
The short answer
Eero Max 7 6 minutes, Asus RT-BE88U 14 minutes — the same test, run the same way. Where they part company is who they suit: the Eero Max 7 is the one to get if you are large homes where setup simplicity matters more than tuning, the Asus RT-BE88U if you are anyone who wants to configure their network rather than accept defaults.
Price difference: The Asus RT-BE88U undercuts the Eero Max 7 by £200. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | Eero Max 7 | Asus RT-BE88U |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £599 | £399 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Standard | Wi-Fi 7 tri-band | Wi-Fi 7 dual-band |
| Throughput | 1.6Gbps at 5m, 640Mbps at 20m | 1.4Gbps at 5m, 420Mbps at 20m |
| Ports | 2x 10GbE, 2x 2.5GbE | 1x 10GbE, 1x 2.5GbE, 4x GbE |
| Coverage | 230m² per unit | 260m² single unit |
| Backhaul | Wired or 6GHz wireless | AiMesh compatible |
| Setup time | 6 minutes | 14 minutes |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks carrying the whole household, with the previous router boxed. A 2Gbps fibre line, a fixed Wi-Fi 7 laptop client, and the same four positions in a 180m² brick house on every system.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Throughput at 5m | iperf3 for five minutes, same room, line of sight, averaged across three runs. |
| Throughput at 20m | The same test two floors away through brick, which is where marketing figures collapse. |
| Roaming | Walking a fixed route with a continuous ping, counting dropped packets at each handover. |
| Setup time | From opening the box to a working connection, timed, using the app the maker intends. |
| Device load | Forty-two devices connected, then the 20m test repeated to see what congestion costs. |
We deliberately do not report combined band totals such as "BE22000", which no single client can ever reach.
The honest caveat: Every figure here is specific to one brick house. Timber-framed homes will see materially better range.
Where the Eero Max 7 wins
- The simplest setup of any mesh system we have tested
- 10GbE on both ports, which almost nothing else offers
- Roaming between nodes is genuinely seamless
It also has the edge on the intangibles: it held 640Mbps at 20m through two brick walls.
Where the Asus RT-BE88U wins
- More manual control than any consumer router at this price
- Eight LAN ports removes the need for a switch
- Free lifetime security features with no subscription
And in day-to-day use, it was the only router we tested that exposed per-device QoS properly.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The Eero Max 7 has one clear weak point — the price per node is hard to justify for most homes — and the Asus RT-BE88U has its own: the interface assumes you know what a VLAN is. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the Asus RT-BE88U costs £200 less. Unless the simplest setup of any mesh system we have tested is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the TP-Link Deco XE75 at £229 — it scored 4 out of 5 and suits most homes — the sensible default unless you have a multi-gig line. If the budget will not stretch, the eero 6+ at £139 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the Eero Max 7 the thing you adjust to is the price per node is hard to justify for most homes, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its standard (Wi-Fi 7 tri-band) is the part you stop thinking about. The Asus RT-BE88U asks for a different accommodation: the interface assumes you know what a VLAN is, against a standard of Wi-Fi 7 dual-band that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The Asus RT-BE88U is 1 year newer, which usually means 1 more year of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: the interface assumes you know what a VLAN is on one side, the price per node is hard to justify for most homes on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the Eero Max 7, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the Eero Max 7 for the simplest setup of any mesh system we have tested. Buy the Asus RT-BE88U for more manual control than any consumer router at this price.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the networking we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Eero Max 7 vs Flint 2: Is the Eero Max 7 Worth £460 More? and Eero Max 7 vs Orbi RBE973: Is the 2024 Model Worth the Change?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
