A year ago I had both a MikroTik and a pfSense box running in the homelab, half as a deliberate comparison and half because I couldn't decide. Twelve months on I have opinions, and they're less tidy than the forum threads would have you believe. The short version: I kept both, doing different jobs, because they're good at different things and pretending one wins outright is a fight nobody needs to have.
Where MikroTik earns its place
RouterOS is dense, and I mean that as a compliment and a warning. Once it clicked, the sheer amount you can do on a small, cheap, low-power box is genuinely impressive. VLANs, policy routing, a proper BGP and OSPF stack on hardware that costs less than a nice dinner. My MikroTik does the routing and switching, the unglamorous layer-three plumbing, and it does it on a few watts without breaking a sweat.
The catch is the learning curve, which is less a curve than a cliff with a rope ladder. The configuration model has its own logic, and that logic is internally consistent but shares very little with how other vendors think. I broke my own connectivity more than once early on, locked myself out with a firewall rule applied in the wrong order, the classic. RouterOS will let you do that. It assumes you meant it.
Where pfSense earns its place
pfSense is the opposite temperament. The web UI is approachable, the defaults are sane, and the package ecosystem means the firewall, the VPN, and the bits I want to actually see and reason about live behind a clear interface. When I want to read a firewall ruleset at a glance, or stand up a VPN without consulting three wiki pages, pfSense wins comfortably. It does the security-facing edge work, and I trust myself not to fat-finger it at midnight, which is worth a lot.
The cost is that it wants more box. A MikroTik sips power; the pfSense machine is a small x86 server that I'm aware of every time I look at the electricity bill. It's also less interesting at the routing layer, the things RouterOS makes trivial can be a faff on pfSense, if they're available at all.
The verdict, such as it is
I kept both because the honest answer is that they're not really competitors in my setup, they're colleagues. MikroTik routes and switches; pfSense guards the edge. If you forced me to one, I'd choose by temperament rather than spec sheet: pick pfSense if you value clarity and want to read your own config in a year, pick MikroTik if you enjoy the depth and don't mind the cliff. A year in, I value both for opposite reasons, and that's a perfectly good outcome for a homelab whose real purpose is to be interesting.