Orbi vs nighthawk R8000

Orbi is designed for whole home Wi-Fi.

Many houses are too large to be served by simply a single wireless router. Up till now you'd typically get e.g. an R8000 then add a wireless range extender to try and cover the rest of the house.

Orbi is designed to be easy to setup. You have the same Wi-Fi SSID for both the router and the satellite so your devices can move between the two easily and not have blackspots. Designing the router and satellite to work together means that we're able to optimise this by dedicating a band to connecting the two in order to get the best results for extending the wireless network. To get the performance that Orbi provides in the past you would have to use wired access points which would require paying a licensed cabler to run ethernet cables around your home.

Often your phone/cable/fibre wiring terminates at one end of the house. This is where the Wi-Fi router tends to get put, but with the wireless router in a non-optimal location there's typically some blackspots (where you can't connect to Wi-Fi because you are out of range or the signal is so poor that it drops out a bit) around the house. To provide optimal wi-fi coverage you should have something in the centre of the home. That's where the satellite comes in handy.

With multiple satellites Orbi is able to cover larger homes than what's possible with a single satellite or if you prefer extend further into a large backyard (by placing a satellite at the back of your house).

You can continue to use the R8000 and place the Orbi router in AP (Access Point mode) if you want and still connect the satellite to the Orbi router.

Some users will want to keep things simple and get Orbi to handle the router tasks, others will just want it to do the whole home Wi-Fi. We're catering to both.

The Orbi doesn't make use of the USB port for connecting storage devices whereas the R8000 does.

If the R8000 covers your whole home (e.g. an apartment) without blackspots then it's a great option. The tri-band Wi-Fi allows you to put different clients on different bands to get best results.

With the Orbi system devices in different areas of the home would connect to the router or the satellite spreading the load that way. One of the bands on the Orbi is dedicated to communication between the router and the satellite, so can extend your network whilst maintaining performance.

It's not that one is better than the other, they are both great at what they do and designed for different needs.