Try dd-wrt firmware. Lets you dip your toe into the water so to speak, with a lot less of the complication of openwrt. At least it used to when I last used it several years ago.

If you have a spare old PC, pfSense is a great way to screw around. Even if it only has one NIC there is (or at least used to be) basic hostap support so you could use the builtin wifi card as a base station. Otherwise spend $20 on a supported USB-Ethernet adapter and you’ve got yourself a router to play with.

So would a router running pfsense then also become my primary WiFi routers too? Or is it best to keep pfsense strictly as a firewall and have a separate router strictly for WiFi?

pfSense doesn’t really do WiFi. So you’d use it as a router/firewall, then have something else do your WiFi. I generally recommend Ubiquiti.

It’s worth noting that a ‘WiFi router’ is usually 3 separate things in one box- a router/firewall, a WiFi access point, and a small switch of usually 4-6 ports. In a home you usually want these things in the same place so they’re in one box. In an enterprise, the router/firewall is usually in the basement where there’s no WiFi, network switches may be in many places and a tiny one in the router won’t help you, and WiFi is up by where the workers are. So it’s that sort of setup that pfSense is designed for.

The way I have my place set up- a pfSense machine is the router/firewall. I then use Netgear managed switches (there’s a few, mainly GS110TP’s), and Ubiquiti WiFi. The Ubiquiti controller runs inside Docker on a small Synology box. Highly recommend this setup.

But I’d just as highly recommend going Ubiquiti all the way. Dream Machine Pro SE is a great base router/firewall, and it has a built in PoE switch so you can hang a few U6 Pro access points off it. You get a bit more flexibility with pfSense but in most home environments it’s not needed.

It’s sort of both.

Netgate is the company that develops pfSense. They make pfSense available as a download that you can run on your own hardware or your own VM. They also sell pfSense routers that have official support and a free upgrade to their slightly nicer ‘pfSense Plus’ version. I generally recommend the official hardware (support the project and all that, and it’s good quality if a bit more expensive). However if you want to save a few bucks you can get a cheap NUC-type PC with a few Intel Ethernet ports from Protectli or similar brands on Amazon.

Routers - Netgate / pfSense. Best router GUI I’ve found. If you understand what you want to make happen, chances are you can figure out how to make it happen without touching a CLI. And generally free of Cisco for license bullshit.

Routing and WiFi- Ubiquiti. Not as flexible as pfSense but even easier to use and if you do both routing and WiFi with them you get a bunch of cool analytics. Their surveillance package is great too as long as you use their cameras, pretty much the best mobile surveillance app I’ve found. Door access system also gets a mention.

Synology for almost everything they do, but particularly storage, backup, surveillance (they support almost every camera, albeit with a license requirement) and hosting of self hosted apps using a nice docker GUI. Not as much bang for buck vs. an old PC in terms of CPU power, but very easy to use.

For home automation- Home Assistant or HomeSeer. Both are open platforms that support almost everything. Home Assistant pulls lightly ahead for me because it’s free and has more 3rd party integrations, even if it has a steeper hearing curve in some areas and some rough edges that require tweaking for basic usability (specifically, Z-Wave requires the ‘z-wave js ui’ plugin to take real control over a Z-Wave mesh, and Z-Wave door locks need the Keymaster plugin to get any sort of user code management, neither are straightforward to install). That said- pair Home Assistant with a Z-Wave dongle and some Inovelli light switches and you have a really beautiful setup with insane flexibility.