Abstract In recent years, we have witnessed the exponential growth of wireless community networks as a response to the clear necessity of Internet access for participation in society. For wireless mesh networks that can scale up to thousands of nodes, which are owned and managed in a decentralized way, it is imperative for their survival to provide the network with self-management mechanisms that reduce the requirements of human intervention and technological knowledge in the operation of a community network. In this paper, we focus on one important self-management mechanism, routing, and we study the scalability, performance, and stability of three proactive mesh routing protocols: BMX6, OLSR, and Babel. We study different metrics on an emulation framework and on the W-ILab.T testbed at iMinds, making the most of the two worlds. Emulation allows us to have more control over the topology and more systematically repeat the experiments, whereas a testbed provides a realistic wireless medium and more reliable measurements, especially in terms of interference and CPU consumption. Results show the relative merits, costs, and limitations of the three protocols.