I Can Save You Money! – Raspberry Pi Alternatives

You might not be able to get Raspberry Pi, but there are plenty of other flavors! We try to find the best alternative single board computer.

Check out the products we featured in this video in order of appearance:

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

FOLLOW US
---------------------------------------------------

MUSIC CREDIT
---------------------------------------------------
Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:43 Raspberry Pi 4 overview
2:54 Banana Pi M5
3:27 Odriod C4
4:30 Libre Le Potato
5:40 Libre Renegade
6:14 Orange Pi 3 LTS
7:20 Odroid N2+
8:15 Orange Pi 5
9:46 Rock Pi 4C+
10:40 NanoPi M4B
11:34 Seeed Rerouter
12:40 LinkStar H68K
12:39 Our Top Picks
14:50 Outro

[LinusTechTips]

Oops, we have a few specs corrections for some of the SBCs.
- le Potato has 100MBit Fast Ethernet, not GbE.
- Renegade has up to 4GB of DDR4
- Orange Pi3 has 2x USB3.0 ports and 1x USB2.0
- N2+ has 4x USB3.0 and 1 micro USB OTG port.

Our sincere apologies for the mistakes! We'll get the video fixed as soon as possible!

Have you used any of these alternative Pis? If so, for what project?

Seeed Studio LinkStar-H68K-0232
Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

[AtomicFeasT]

You guys really should have used a pie chart for all benchmarks. Lost opportunity.

[dgsprysoup]

The advantage with Raspberry is their ecosystem and community support and other boards don't really come close to it. Unless other companies start giving proper ootb drivers for their SBCs, Pis are still the only way to go unfortunately

[MaxenceAbela]

It's also worth noting that the n2+ is the only one that includes an RTC clock, which is a very useful feature for industrial devices or embedded systems.

[njnjco]

One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is how well documented it is. You can find whatever information about it that you need fairly easily. I wonder how easy it would be to find solutions online to any problems you might encounter when working with alternatives.

[Snowpanel]

I wish you talked more about the software aspect of those pi alternatives. Unlike desktop computers, each SBC manufacturer has to provide their own Linux image (often with custom kernel patches), meaning that compared to RasPis there's often fewer OSes available, more compatibilities issues, and much fewer online resources available for troubleshooting. That's the main reason why Pis are still the most popular boards despite not having the best hardware offering.

[Jmcinally]

For folks that want more in-depth reviews of these SBC, Explaining Computers is a great channel. The guy does pretty extensive testing for comparison and has been at it for years.

[PaulM-ists]

The dual 2.5gb router is a steal compared to what is usually out there. I imagined needing such a thing in future applications when 1gb+ becomes affordable 🍻

[joelwilliam]

Very informative video Linus, I'd love to see more of such videos on SBCs

[leoozada]

We need more Raspberry Pi content, feel like it's great area that LTT hasn't explored.

[zahialsalman]

I'd love to see you guys try some projects with some of these to see how much or little trouble you run into without the full support of the raspberry pi community. Maybe boost the community around these alternative single board computers

[trunovmichael]

Perhaps for next comparison, even if you compare only the specs, I'd mention the power consumption. For SBCs it might be important. After all, the whole appeal of ARM processors was computation per Watt.
Typically boards with larger RAM have higher power floor.

[probablyuseless]

Good mention on the Orange Pi about the non standard and hard to get working GPIO pinout and insane power draw for a small board. I had these issues with Orange Pi 2 and SE and seems like years later they still exist. Great boards for the price, but poor software support to back them up. Tinkerboard, MangoPi and NanoPi are also worth looking at. I just looked up some of the boards that I have and realised that they are all going for at least 2-3 times the price than what I bought them for, so it's not just raspberry pi that shot up to astronomical prices.

[JeffGeerling]

"It has a slight CPU advantage over the 🍌"

Well I should certainly hope so!

[kajurn]

Last i checked many of the things you can do with a Raspberry aren't as straightforward with these other sbc's. The problem was that Pi was so good that businesses started using it for their projects and made demand skyrocket and alongside it, prices.

[tsxtreme]

Thank you so very much for the detailed comparison and description.
I would love to see the whole of the information tabulated for easy consumption if possible.

[OlafFichtner]

That's a nice comparison! It would be even better if it included evaluation of software support. While many companies churn out nice hardware, not all of them care for the software side, which can get users quite frustrated...

[saiyadulahmad]

Having owned multiple Pis and alternatives, I'm of the opinion that for most IoT use cases, an older model Pi 3B is all you need. It works fine and hits that sweet spot of performance and power draw.

[pretendthisisaname]

I remember being amazed when I first got a Raspberry Pi Zero running. The setup was effortless but what really shocked me was how capable the system was for a PC that only cost me £10 and could fit in a wallet.

For just £10 and a few dongles I had a relatively capable desktop computer. Obviously it's not going to run modern games but you could still use it for word processing, running certain programs, and even using search engines (this one may not be possible now though).

There was once a time when computers were the size of a small house and no more powerful than a modern calculator. Back then, the concept of full office contained within a computer the size of a pack of cigarettes would be beyond sci fi, it would be full on fantasy.

[Killerbear]

depending on your usecase you can even buy an old version of those alternatives for even lower prices. I'm using an old BananaPi M1 for Home Assistant + Pi Hole and it runs just fine.