The Best Wi-Fi Mesh Network Systems for 2024

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Buying Guide: The Best Wi-Fi Mesh Network Systems for 2024

Many late-model wireless routers can project strong signal to most rooms of a typical medium-size house. But larger homes and dwellings with dense walls, multiple floors, metal and concrete substructures, and other material impediments may require additional components to bring Wi-Fi to areas that a single router can’t reach. Range extenders can help fill dead zones, but most provide only half the bandwidth that you get from your main router. Access points, meanwhile, offer more bandwidth than range extenders, but they require a wired connection to the main router. And both solutions typically create a new network SSID that you have to log in to as you move from one area of the house to another.

If you’re new to networking, you might be worrying that all of the above will leave you sitting on the floor surrounded by a lot of router documentation and questioning your life choices. Fortunately, there’s another alternative: a mesh Wi-Fi system.

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What Is a Wi-Fi Mesh System?

Also known by popular brand names like Google Nest Wi-Fi Pro, or TP-Link Deco, mesh systems (or mesh Wi-Fi routers) are designed to blanket your home with wireless coverage. These systems are a hybrid of sorts, made up of several networking components. A main router connects directly to your modem, and a series of satellite modules, or nodes, get placed throughout your house. They are all part of a single wireless network, and they share the same SSID and password. Unlike range extenders, which typically communicate with the router via the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, or 6GHz radio bands, most Wi-Fi system satellites use mesh technology to talk to the router and to each other.

Setting up and maintaining a traditional wireless home network can be daunting, even if you’re tech-savvy. Wi-Fi mesh systems, on the other hand, are geared toward users with little or no technical knowledge and can be installed in minutes. They typically come with a user-friendly mobile app that walks you through the installation process with easy-to-follow illustrated instructions. The app tells you where to place each node for maximum coverage and chooses the best Wi-Fi channel and radio band for optimal throughput performance, so you can maintain a strong wireless connection as you move about the house.

(Credit: John Burek)

Wi-Fi mesh systems are easy to expand (with no current limit on the number of nodes you can add) and manage using your smartphone. From an app, you can disable Wi-Fi access to specific devices with the press of a button, or give certain devices network priority without having to log in to a complicated network console.

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What Should I Look for in Wi-Fi Mesh Router Design and Features?

Most Wi-Fi mesh systems look nothing like a traditional setup with a router and range extender. The router and nodes use internal antennas and are almost always tastefully designed so you can place them out in the open rather than in a closet or under a desk. (Don’t expect to find a lot of flashing LED indicators—these systems are designed to blend in with your home’s décor.) They usually have at least one LAN port for connecting to devices like TVs and gaming consoles, but USB connectivity is a rare feature at this point.

Similar to modern standalone routers, mesh systems are multi-band networking devices that operate on the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz radio bands. Some models offer support for Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) technology, which streams data to multiple compatible wireless clients simultaneously rather than sequentially. Most Wi-Fi systems use band steering to automatically select the least-crowded radio band for the best performance and offer easy-to-use parental controls, guest networking, and device-prioritization options. While designed for ease of use, they usually let you configure port forwarding and wireless security settings but lack the advanced network-management options such as individual band control, firewall settings, and wireless transmission rate settings that you get with a traditional router. Nor can you use third-party WRT firmware to customize the system for enhanced performance and network monitoring.

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What Are the Disadvantages of a Mesh Network?

The only significant disadvantage of mesh networking systems is their pricing, which is almost always higher than a standalone router’s. Most manufacturers sell mesh systems in flexible configurations, where you choose the number of nodes that match the coverage needed for the amount of square feet your house contains. A system with three nodes is typically pricier than a system with two nodes, which in turn is pricier than either a single node (which is available with some mesh systems) or an alternative standalone router. And if you need to spread signals throughout a house that’s 4,000 square feet or more, you’re typically going to need a three-node system, which means upgrading to a mesh system from your existing standalone router will be a significant hit to your wallet.

(Credit: Netgear)

However, in return for the higher cash outlay, you get all the advantages described here—consistent Wi-Fi coverage throughout your house, easy installation, and much more. And in some cases, you might actually save money by buying a multiple-node mesh system instead of trying to improve your existing router’s coverage by adding boosters or extenders. We’ll take a look at the advantages mesh offers over this scenario below.

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Do You Lose Speed With Wi-Fi Mesh Networking?

Speed problems are a secondary potential disadvantage with mesh systems. Concerned that using a mesh system to spread consistent Wi-Fi signals throughout your home will reduce your internet speed overall, or take away the peak speeds you experience on devices that currently have a wired connection to your existing router? It’s possible, at least in theory, but only if you have a large number of Wi-Fi devices and a relatively slow plan from your internet service provider. For example, if your connection offers 100Mbps download speeds and 5Mbps upload speeds, a common scenario for entry-level broadband plans in many areas of the country, you could easily max them out with just two or three connected devices, like a phone, TV, and a computer. If you’ve got a dozen or so additional devices spread throughout your home—the average American household has 21, a number that’s actually decreasing over time—that can suddenly access that full speed thanks to your new mesh system, you could inadvertently create a bottleneck.

It’s an easy problem to solve if you do run into it, though. Thanks to the ease with which most mesh systems can be configured, you can often group devices together into high-priority categories that get allocated bandwidth first (like your work PC you use for videoconferencing) and relegate other devices like thermostats and alarm clocks to a lower tier. And if that doesn’t work, you could consider upgrading the speed of your internet plan.

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Do Wi-Fi Mesh Systems Support Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7?

A few super-high-end mesh systems do support the cutting-edge Wi-Fi 7 standard, but they’re quite expensive for now, and overkill for most people. Wi-Fi 6 support is much more common on mainstream mesh systems, and you should insist on it in a new mesh system, especially if you own client devices that support it.

Wi-Fi 6 (also called 802.11ax) is an evolution of Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) technology that promises increased throughput speeds (up to 9.6Gbps), less network congestion, greater client capacity, and better range performance courtesy of several new and improved wireless technologies, including Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). OFDMA improves overall throughput by breaking Wi-Fi channels into sub-channels, allowing up to 30 users to share a channel at the same time. 

Additionally, 802.11ax takes advantage of previously unused radio frequencies to provide faster 2.4GHz performance and uses MU-MIMO streaming, too. Some Wi-Fi 6 devices can also communicate on the less-crowded 6GHz band, which is known as Wi-Fi 6E—Wi-Fi 7 devices also use the 6GHz band.

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Which Is Better: A Wireless Mesh Router, or a Range Extender?

Aside from a few pricey contenders, most mesh systems are only slightly more expensive than a router/range extender combination. Wi-Fi systems range in price from less than $100 for a single-node system to at least $300 for a setup that can cover a 3,000-square-foot house with three or more nodes.

(Credit: Amazon)

The pricing looks higher with these systems because, in most cases, you’re paying for at least two devices, the router and a router node that forms the mesh. Most systems, in fact, come with two nodes, so you’re buying three devices in total. If you break it down per device, you’ll most often find that they cost only a little more than you’d pay for a similarly powered router and range extender solution. That’s especially true now that we’re seeing prices coming down on mesh systems in general, even the newer models compatible with Wi-Fi 6E.

(Credit: Arris)

Also remember: Wi-Fi systems are all about ease of use. They are a snap to set up and manage, offer whole-house coverage via a series of attractive nodes, and provide seamless room-to-room roaming over a single network. If you want total control over your network and require the best possible throughput performance and connectivity options, stick with a traditional router solution. If you don’t want to deal with things like assigning radio bands and logging in to different networks as you move throughout your home, however, a Wi-Fi system makes sense. (For more about the differences between these two technologies, check out our explainer Wi-Fi Range Extender vs. Mesh Network: What’s the Difference?)

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Ready to Buy the Right Wi-Fi Mesh System for You?

We’ve laid out our top mesh picks in the detailed spec breakout that accompanies this guide. For even more detail, click through to our full reviews of the best Wi-Fi systems we’ve tested. Need some more help getting all your devices up and running their fastest? Check out our tips for troubleshooting your internet connection. And once you’ve picked out the best mesh system for your home, read our primer on how to set up a mesh Wi-Fi router.