The Best Raspberry Pi Alternatives
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The pocket-sized Raspberry Pi 4 computer is beloved by DIY enthusiasts and hardware hackers for its versatility and its ease of use. But while the tiny PC is cool, it ain’t perfect. It chokes on 4K and H.265 video, it has no easy way to boot from an SSD or hard drive, and it can’t run Windows. Fortunately for those who require those capabilities in their projects, there are alternatives to the Pi.
We’ve picked five single-board computers (known as SBCs) that offer more power or flexibility than the Pi, more inputs and outputs, and more of what your project might need. Which alternative is right for you depends on what you want to do with the device. For homemade robots and other projects that don’t need a screen display, it’s hard to argue with the low cost, processing power, and profusion of in/outputs of the PocketBeagle. If you're building your own media center, the Odroid N2 is my top pick—install CoreELEC on this $65 SBC and it can do everything from play Netflix in HD to emulate a PlayStation for retro gaming. But each of the devices listed below fills its own niche. Read on to find out which one is best for you.
For Networking Ninjas
The Rock 64 is one of the veterans of the SBC world; it was first released in 2017. It’s roughly comparable to the Pi 4 but skips the Wi-Fi to focus on wired connections: It offers Gigabit Ethernet and a second 100-Mbps connection, which makes it a great pick for a router or security device. The addition of an eMMC socket makes it easy to add a bootable flash memory module that will be more reliable than a micro SD card. Pine64, the company behind this device, offers the computer as an LTS (long-term supply) device, which means the company will be making it until at least 2022. The hardware also supports a huge range of Linux distros. All of this makes it a great pick for a network-focused device like a router or ad blocker that doesn’t need a wireless connection.
For Robot Wranglers
Need something small, but with more power than the Pi Zero? The PocketBeagle is a $31 single-board computer the size of a USB thumb drive. It packs an impressive amount of computing power in the form of an ARM-3 Cortex CPU, two 200-MHz microprocessors, and 512 MB of memory. It runs Debian 9.9 or a range of other flavors of Linux.
One thing it doesn’t have, though, is video capability. Although it has pretty much every other input and output you are ever likely to need (including eight analog inputs and two USB buses), there is no HDMI output. It’s an SBC that’s designed to sit inside a robot and be controlled over the internet, rather than just pumping pretty pictures onto a display.
For Stream Dreamers
Homage or rip-off? It’s hard to tell with the Banana Pi, a $38 SBC that takes the design of the Raspberry Pi and turns everything up to 11. It one-ups the Raspberry Pi by providing an M.2 Key E slot you can use to install an SSD drive. The board also has a set of GPIO pins that make it compatible with most Pi Hats, the hardware expansion modules for the Pi. The Banana Pi is slightly larger than the Raspberry, though, so it won’t fit into a case made for a Raspberry Pi board. Still, at the same price as a standard Pi, the Banana adds a number of useful features that make it a great pick for media centers and other builds that can benefit from some local storage.
For Media Masters
Odroid makes a wide range of single-board computers, most of which are designed for NAS (network attached storage) devices. The N2 is more of a direct Pi replacement, especially as it includes the standard GPIO pins so you can expand the hardware capabilities by adding Hats. It includes everything you get with a Pi 4, including Gigabit Ethernet, 4K HDMI, and USB 3, but it adds a couple more USB 3 ports and an IR receiver. It also has much better cooling, thanks to a big-ass heat sink on the back of the board. That’s a big plus for media center builds where a processor can get strained while transcoding video.
For Windows Hackers
What would you get if you chopped off the screen of your laptop and threw the keyboard in the trash? You'd get something close to the Latte Panda Alpha. It’s a low-end Windows 10 PC on a single card: an Intel 7th-generation Core m3 processor, 8 GB of RAM, 64 GB of flash memory, two M2 slots, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3, and as many inputs and outputs as you are ever likely to need. There’s also an Arduino-compatible coprocessor for low-power applications. That’s all housed in a board not much bigger than a pack of cards. Just plug in a 5V power source and you’ve got a full-fledged Windows PC.
The downsides? Windows, and the price. Microsoft's operating system sucks up a lot of the processing power, sometimes leaving not that much for the apps. You can install Ubuntu Linux on it instead, which runs a bit leaner. Either way, it ain’t cheap: At $449 for the base model with Windows 10 and $409 for Ubuntu, this is the most expensive of our SBC picks by a wide margin. But if you want to run Windows apps, it’s a great, compact PC.
