Testing: Released every few days, only undergoes basic internal testing, should not be used in production.

Stable: Released every few weeks, includes all tested features and fixes.

When a Stable release has been out for a while and seems to be stable enough, it gets promoted into the Long Term branch, replacing an older release, which is then moved to Archive. Long term: Released rarely, and includes only the most important fixes, upgrades within one number branch not add new features.When upgrading RouterOS, you can choose a release chain from which to install the new packages. RouterOS versions are released in several 'release chains': Long-term, Stable and Beta. Therefore v5.2 is older than v5.18, which is newer. An identifier of 2.5, for instance, is not 'two and a half' or 'half way to version three', it is the fifth second-level revision of the second first-level revision. RouterOS versions are numbered sequentially when a period is used to separate sequences, it does not represent a decimal point, and the sequences do not have positional significance. The upgrade procedure on already installed devices is straight forward.

MikroTik devices are preinstalled with RouterOS, so installation is usually not needed, except in the case where installing RouterOS on an x86 PC.

Router operating system