Business Choice Awards 2017: Routers and Servers

When it comes to getting work done, do you remember the 1990s, when the web wasn't even part of your lives, or a pre-email 1980s? Thank your lucky stars—and your IT guy—for the router that now keeps you connected.

Likewise, consider the server storing all your files. Without servers and network attached storage (NAS) devices we'd be emailing, FTPing, Slacking, or whatever transfer of files makes life livable in an age of high collaboration. The central storage of a server makes sharing a breeze, and the modern servers/NAS also make it easy to share more than just documents—you can stream media, even out to the internet for remote access, with the right setup.

Servers and routers are the topic of this month's Business Choice, ancillary answers conducted as part of this month's Readers' Choice survey for consumer products in the same categories. Read on to see which networking vendors provide the goods suitable for offices large and small.

You can be part of Business Choice! Sign up for the Readers' Choice Survey mailing list to receive invitations in the future.

Looking for expert opinion? Check out our roundup of the Best Wireless Routers and 10 Things Business Owners Should Know Before Buying NAS Devices.

Routers for Work

Like last year, we took a dip in the polls overall of people rating work routers, leaving our previous top rated vendor, Asus, behind since it didn't earn enough ratings to be included.

Thankfully, Netgear is ready to step into the limelight. Whereas last year it tied with Cisco for a second place finish with an 8.2 (out of a score of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best), Netgear jumped up to an 8.5 in overall satisfaction this year. A similar score for the likelihood to recommend Netgear products to colleagues, and an excellent 8.9 for overall reliability, made Netgear the big winner for 2017 when it comes to work routers.

Cisco likewise had an increase, shooting up a tenth of a point to 8.3 overall—but it actually outscored Netgear when it comes to reliability with a 9.0, and the likelihood to be recommended at 8.7. Even its tech support rating is higher—though a lot more Cisco products actually needed tech support and repairs than the other vendors that placed in our results. That said, the scores show that you'll probably be happy with a Cisco router—a name that's synonymous with networking and internet connectivity in big offices.

Third place this year belongs to Linksys, not too far behind its former owner Cisco (the Linksys brand is now owned and operated by Belkin.) It also had a slight increase in its overall score and managed to have the fewest products that needed repairs at 29 percent, ahead of Netgear and Cisco.

WINNERS: WORK ROUTERS

Business Choice seal

Netgear
With almost across-the-board score increases in every category, Netgear steps into the spotlight for the first time as a Business Choice selection for workplace routers, as determined by the readers of PCMag.

Servers/NAS Devices for Work

Look at the chart from last year and you won't see much difference in 2017 except slightly better numbers. Taiwan's Synology continues its streak of performing high in the minds of PCMag readers, both at home and at the office.

Synology's overall score shot from a 9.0 last year to a 9.2 for overall satisfaction; it also earned an incredible 9.5 in reliability (up from last year's 9.0) and went up for tech support and likelihood to recommend (the latter rated so high, with another 9.5, that the NetPromoter Score based on the same number is an almost record high 84 percent.)

The only place Synology fell was that more people needed tech support (68 percent) and repairs (37 percent) than last year.

In second place with similar increases is Dell; it got a fantastic 8.5 overall score, though its likelihood to be recommended to colleagues fell to an 8.0 from last year's 8.4. Western Digital comes in third with the same 8.0 overall score it had last year and slight dips in other areas. Lost to us in this year's results due to not enough responses: Seagate.

WINNERS: SERVERS/NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE

Business Choice seal

Synology
It's been a long time since any vendor besides Synology impressed PCMag's readership with network storage capabilities. From the looks of the scores it earned here, it may be years again before anyone else comes close to equaling it.

Methodology

We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. The surveys was hosted by Equation Research, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from March 13 through April 2, 2017.

Respondents were asked to rate their routers and NAS devices using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your router (or NAS)?"

Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.

Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2016.)

If you would like to participate in PCMag's monthly Readers' Choice surveys and to be eligible for our monthly sweepstakes promotion, please sign up today.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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