Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATED January 2019 The Gryphon router is meh. It's not the stellar product that some of the reviews, or its own advertising, claim. And in many regards, I prefer my previous router (TP-Link Archer C9 AC1900), which yes I understand has the “vulnerability” which allows it to be compromised through the web interface… but even this is limited as you must have a physical (hard-wired) connection to the router from a compromised computer, and even then you can take steps to minimize your risk. Anyway, back to this Gryphon router… THE GOOD: • It’s really easy to set up. • Support Team is very responsive. THE BAD: (Read further below for details) • The app / user interface is way too simple. • Documentation is almost non-existent. • Browsing history is incredibly limited (only domain-level) and only the most recent entries • No browsing history is available for devices classified as “Things”. • Can’t check if you have the latest firmware version. • “Homework time” and “Bedtime” lack granularity. • Can’t check what’s blocked based on user account type. While the support team is very responsive and I usually get a response within minutes of submitting an issue, I find that I am frequently contacting support, with the general response that Gryphon hears customers' feedback and is working to improve the product. So I feel as though the product is more of a beta, and I'm part of the testing process. Contrast this with some of the other well-established router manufacturers where their product are mature from a development standpoint. I definitely like the very responsive support team, but wish that I didn't need to contact support so frequently. The app / user interface is way too simple. While it makes setup relatively easy (since there’s very few settings you can actually configure), I do wish they offered the option to view an “advanced” interface and customize many of the settings. I’m coming from a TP-Link Archer C9 AC1900 router, and that router gives both a simple interface and an advanced interface, with the user manual built into the interface, and myriads of configuration options. One user commented below that I have confused this device with a prosumer-level device… No, I didn’t confuse it with something else… Indeed, I expected more than what this Gryphon provides. An $80 TP-Link router has advanced configuration settings. Even a $39 Linksys provides more configuration options than this Gryphon… and if you don’t like the $39-router’s firmware, you can install your own open-source firmware. This Gryphon costs $200+ and you can configure only basic settings… So yes, I expected more from this router. The router can only be configured through a smartphone app, and your router needs to be connected to the Internet in order for you to be able to configure it. If your Internet connection goes down, you can’t configure the router even for local network purposes. There is no way to configure this router through a desktop (or laptop) user interface using a wired connection. When using the app to configure the router, presumably all of your configuration settings (including your WiFi passwords) are passed through the Gryphon “servers” prior to going to your router. The Privacy Policy states that network settings information is passed to Gryphon servers, but is stored only temporarily (although temporarily isn’t defined). You’ll just have to trust that they are being ethical about the information collected. If you disconnect the router from the Internet, you can no longer see the devices which are connected, but you can still see your WiFi passwords. So are your WiFi passwords stored on your smartphone app, or are they stored on the Gryphon servers? There’s no documentation on how this works. So much for temporarily storing your data… Furthermore, any useful documentation on this router is essentially non-existent. You can go to the Gryphon support webpage for some limited FAQs, or you can watch even further limited YouTube videos which explain to you how to do some of the most basic and self-explanatory tasks, and that’s about it. So there’s no good detailed documentation on this router. To further demonstrate the lack of documentation… consider the user types (toddler, elementary school, middle school , high school, adult 18+, unfiltered). All you are told regarding these user types is whether or not these user types filter out content for violence, guns, gambling, alcohol, and drugs. For example, elementary school and middle school user types appear to be exactly identical with regards to filtering out violence, guns, gambling, alcohol, drugs… but they are not. There’s definitely other filtering going on, but you don’t know what it is, and there’s no way to find out other than trail-and-error, which is very frustrating. There’s no way to understand beforehand the access privileges / whitelist / blacklist configuration of each user type. For example, my elementary-school child likes to play Minecraft… but the Minecraft program was blocked from connecting to the Internet, and the associated Mojang.com website was also blocked. Was this because of violence? Guns? Who knows… there was no documentation on this. I found out by trial-and-error. When I changed his user profile from “elementary school” to “middle school” Minecraft was able to connect to the Internet again. I shouldn’t have to change profiles in order to allow access… I should be able to configure the user profile appropriately the first time using documentation provided by Gryphon… You can configure “homework time” and “bed time” only to the extent that you are allowed to do so based on the user type (elementary vs middle school vs high school vs …). For example, if you want to set homework time, you can only do that for the “school” type of users, not for adult. However, the school type users filter out any websites flagged for violence, guns gambling, alcohol, and drugs, and some of the websites are (in my opinion) incorrectly flagged and therefore blocked. So if I want to allow my kids to access one of these websites, I have to set the setting to “Adult 18+” which grants them permission to view the website but then removes the “homework time” feature. If you have enabled “homework time” or “bed time”, you can select the days of the week that these times are enforced, but they are the same times for all days of the week selected. For example, you can’t set homework time to start at 4pm on Monday and 6pm on Tuesday. There’s no granularity for each day of the week. They advertise that you can “view your child’s browsing history.” This is misleading, as the browsing history available through the Gryphon app is not even close to the giving the same information as the browsing history of the internet browser. It only offers only domain-level browsing history. While some reviewers have pointed out that this is similar to business class UTM systems, I feel that if they’re going to advertise the ability to “view your child’s browsing history” then it should be a real browsing history as most of us consumers understand “browsing history” to mean. Or perhaps they can include an footnote that states "domain-level browsing history"... Otherwise, I feel I've been misled. More on the browsing history… you can only see the most recent timestamp that a specific domain was accessed. So if your child accessed 100 YouTube links in the last few hours, you only see the most recent entry. As far as you can tell, your child only accessed YouTube once just a few moments ago. Still more on the browsing history… I wish they would allow me to click on an item in the browsing history, and it takes me to the exact website that my child accessed. But you can’t do this… and if you could it wouldn’t be of any usefulness since they only collect domain-level information at the moment, and I have no interest in being directed to just the domain. Last thing to mention on browsing history… it’s collected based on users, not devices, which is a problem because some devices (like thermostats, NAS, etc) cannot be assigned to users, so for these devices there’s no browsing history collected. If you want to see what domains these devices are connecting to, you have to configure the device to be a computer or similar, and then assign it to a user. But what does this do to the AI monitoring… I don’t know because there’s no useful information on this… All you’re told is that the router is smart and can detect threats based on the device type… So if you follow this logic, you just configured your thermostat to act like a computer, which then tells the router to treat the network traffic to/from this device like a computer instead of a thermostat, all so that you can log browsing history?!?!? Does this expose you to threats? If I had to take an educated guess, I would say yes. There’s no way to check if you have the most recent firmware. It would be nice if they displayed on their support page the current firmware version and when it was issued so that you can compare with the firmware displayed in you Gryphon app. Alternatively, they could have an option within the Gryphon app to “check for firmware updates” which would give you feedback that you have the latest firmware… but again the interface is designed to be so simple that this feature isn’t available. You’ll just have to trust that you have the most recent firmware. When you finally receive a notification that firmware is available to be installed, you do get a list of changes that are included in the firmware update, but the list of changes is not comprehensive / all-inclusive. When the original review was written, there was a security issue… The router responded to ping requests coming from the Internet. So hackers scanning for responsive IP addresses could find your router to be present. I contacted support about this, and they indicated it would be fixed in the next firmware update coming in about a week’s time. The update actually came about a month later. Some (including the Gryphon Care Team) commented that ping response presents only a negligible risk. Maybe… but it’s easy enough to keep disable, and so why even allow a “negligible risk”. To re-iterate the last point about the router responding to ping requests, this is a big deal for me. The company boasts itself on having “UNMATCHED PROTECTION & SECURITY” per the product description above, and responses from the Gryphon team to many of these reviews state that the router has gone through extensive testing. My question is… how did they miss that the router responds to ping? And for so long? That they needed a customer to tell them that the router responds to ping in order for them to find the issue? And if they missed this issue, what other issues did they also miss that I don’t know about? And since the user interface is so dumbed down, I don’t know what configurations have been made without my consent. It really makes me doubt whether I made the right move to purchase this item. IN SUMMARY: • If you are the type of person with very little knowledge about home networking, and you want a secure device which you can set it up quickly and easily, and not worry about it again (except for your $100/yr fee for intrusion protection), then this is the router for you. • If you are a parent who wants parental controls, you will be frustrated at the constant need to switch user profiles, as there's no way to check for whitelist / blacklist / access privileges and your kids will complain that perfectly acceptable websites / videos are blocked. • If you are an advanced user who wants configuration options, or you want a mature product for which you don't want to repeatedly contact the support team, then this is not the router for you.