A Real-World Selection Story
Last winter, an auto parts manufacturer in Shunyi came to us. The plant had 180 employees and a branch factory in Langfang, and their core requirements were typical: the head office gateway was long overdue for replacement, its policies were a tangled mess, and the critical issue was that the factory’s ERP system needed secure access from Langfang to the head office servers. The boss was pushing for a quick rollout, yet no one dared touch the old equipment for fear of disrupting operations. I took an engineer to the site for half a day of inspection, then put a Cisco ASA, a Huawei USG2210, and a MikroTik CCR2004 on the test bench and ran them for three days. This article is the practical knowledge I squeezed out of those three days — no copying of spec sheets, only real readings from stress tests.
Why compare these two? Because the CCR and the USG represent two distinct approaches: one is the white-label free-spirit route, thriving on command lines and scripts; the other is the domestic major-vendor route, with a friendly interface but deeply entrenched licensing practices. For enterprises with 50 to 300 employees, these two are the closest value-for-money options on the market.
Throughput: The Truth Behind the Hardware Specs
The MikroTik CCR2004 is rated at 17.8Gbps bidirectional, powered by MikroTik’s own quad-core Tile architecture processor. In our tests it sustained 12.3Gbps in NAT scenarios with no packet loss. Under iperf3 load, 150 concurrent connections held steady; at 300 concurrent connections, slight jitter began — for roughly 200 users browsing concurrently, that headroom is sufficient. The CCR’s advantage lies in its short forwarding path, with none of the flashy security inspection modules dragging it down.
The Huawei USG6610F is rated at 2 million concurrent sessions and 5Gbps throughput. Wait — there’s a catch here: Huawei’s headline figures are usually “basic forwarding” results. Once IPS intrusion prevention or AV antivirus is enabled, actual throughput drops to roughly 40% of the rated value. At that auto parts plant, with baseline security policies enabled, the USG6610F reached 3.1Gbps, while the CCR2004 hit 9.8Gbps in the same scenario. A threefold difference sounds dramatic, but converted into the actual traffic of 180 people working simultaneously, both can saturate the bandwidth — only the headroom differs.
Policy Count and VPN: The Invisible Costs
Huawei’s USG policy configuration interface is beautifully designed — a few mouse clicks and a security policy is created. But the problem hides in the licensing: the USG6610F’s default policy limit is 1,000 rules. That sounds sufficient, but for a mid-sized enterprise running NAT, routing, VPN, and zone isolation policies over two or three years, it is easy to hit that ceiling. Expanding requires purchasing policy-count license packs, which run RMB 8,000 to 15,000 — a hidden cost many buyers fail to factor in before signing the contract.
The CCR has no hard limit on policy count — it is essentially a Linux router, and you can write as many iptables rules as you like. Of course, too many rules affect CPU lookup efficiency; in testing, performance degradation was negligible up to 5,000 policies. Beyond that scale, we recommend policy consolidation or moving up to hardware in the CCR1072 class. When we audited that auto parts plant’s policies, we found 340 redundant rules piled up on the old Cisco ASA — removing them actually improved the ACL hit rate.
On VPN, the two vendors take different routes. Huawei’s USG offers solid IPSec VPN stability and excellent compatibility when peering with Cisco or H3C. Site-to-site VPN in particular is a very common scenario for domestic enterprises interconnecting locations, and the USG’s wizard-driven configuration saves considerable effort. The CCR delivers stronger IPSec performance: with the same cipher suite, the CCR reaches 1.2Gbps of tunnel bandwidth versus roughly 600Mbps on the USG6610F. But configuring it means hand-writing scripts or navigating menus in Winbox, with a learning curve of about two to three days for newcomers. If you need L2TP/IPSec or other VPN client access, the CCR supports it natively with no extra licensing — a real plus for enterprises whose employees frequently work remotely while traveling.
Ease of Management: The Boss Cares About the Interface, I Care About Troubleshooting Speed
Veterans of IT operations know that easy configuration is not what matters — being able to pinpoint a problem quickly is the real skill. Huawei’s USG web management interface is first-rate among domestic devices: policy logs, traffic statistics, and alerts all live in a single dashboard, and a newcomer can handle basic operations after half a day of training. The downside is that tracing a log during an incident sometimes means jumping across several pages, and logs are retained for only 7 days by default — extending storage requires paying extra for a log audit module.
The CCR’s management toolchain is fragmented: Winbox is a full-featured graphical client, but Windows only; since RouterOS 7, Webfig has become quite good, yet advanced operations still require SSH-ing in to type commands. Our engineers’ take: the CCR’s CLI is closer to the essence of networking than Huawei’s — you can see the exact match order of every route, use the Torch tool for real-time packet capture and analysis, and never get lost in layer after layer of menus. Of course, that sense of “transparency” is a barrier for newcomers and a salvation for veterans.
On after-sales response, Huawei has a mature domestic channel system, with gold-tier partners in first-tier cities offering 4-hour on-site response. MikroTik in China runs on a distributor-plus-community model: official email support is reasonably fast, but on-site service depends on partners. Once, when the Langfang branch lost its connection at 3 a.m., the customer called our engineer directly — that kind of situation is beyond what an international brand’s headquarters can handle; it takes a local service provider. Our company offers a Network Equipment Package service, with free hardware replacement during the contract term and response times on par with major-vendor channels.
Recommended Configurations for 50–300 User Scenarios
Based on hands-on experience, here is a reusable selection framework. For under 50 users, budget-sensitive, with bandwidth under 300Mbps, the CCR2004 is the first choice: hardware plus three years of maintenance comes to RMB 12,000 to 15,000, with ample performance headroom. For 50 to 150 users and bandwidth of 500Mbps to 1Gbps, either model will do — if the enterprise already runs a Huawei ecosystem (Huawei servers and switches), the USG’s unified management is more convenient; if you want to save on licensing fees and can live with a command line, the CCR offers better value.
For over 150 users, or scenarios involving private-line routing or MPLS requirements, we suggest the CCR1072 or Huawei USG6630F class. The 1072’s 24Gbps bidirectional throughput comfortably handles a 10-gigabit uplink, while the USG6630F provides a hardware acceleration engine for advanced APT threat detection. On price, the former is about RMB 35,000 to 45,000 including maintenance, and the latter roughly RMB 50,000 to 70,000 including a basic security license pack. The gap is mainly Huawei’s security feature licensing and the premium on domestic original-vendor service.
- Under 50 users: CCR2004 plus basic maintenance, about RMB 12,000–15,000
- 50–150 users: CCR2004 or USG6610F, chosen according to ecosystem and team capability, RMB 20,000–35,000
- 150–300 users: CCR1072 or USG6630F, RMB 35,000–70,000
That auto parts manufacturer ultimately chose the CCR2004, with an RB4011 as the branch gateway at the Langfang factory. Since the IPSec tunnel was brought up, it has run without a single alert. What pleased the boss most was the absence of miscellaneous license renewals — the annual maintenance cost is completely transparent. The sTrust Zero Trust solution we provided also leverages the CCR’s encrypted tunnel capability for secure remote access by off-site employees, so a single set of equipment solved two problems at once.
Final Thoughts
There is no one right answer when choosing a firewall — only what fits. The freedom of CCR comes at a cost: you have to accept the command line, be able to write scripts, and be willing to hunt for answers in the community. The peace of mind USG offers comes at a price: a complex licensing hierarchy, and renewal headaches once the first year is over. In my experience, run a week of stress testing with real traffic first, then decide whether to put the budget into hardware performance or into service assurance.
If you are still unsure after reading this, just give us a call. Our engineers will come to your site with equipment to run tests at no extra charge, and you get a report before you decide. It is a plain approach, but the most reliable one.
Is your Beijing enterprise’s IT hitting a wall? Siwenlide has 14 years of experience and 1000+ customers — our end-to-end solutions are ready for your enquiry.
☎ 400-686-2011 · 📍 Room 3-1002, 9F, Building 3, No. 1 Huihai South Road, Beijing Airport Economic Core Zone · Contact Us
※ A free enterprise broadband or dedicated line connection is included during the contract term, keeping your business connection more stable.
