5 reasons the "cheaper" Raspberry Pi rivals are often a waste of money
When the first Raspberry Pi hit the market, it was in a class of its own. I still remember buying my first one and not believing that you could get a whole Linux PC for such a low price. It was never expected to be such a popular product, but the Pi exploded in popularity, and is now on its fifth mainline generation .
Unfortunately, it's not just the selection of Raspberry Pis that's swollen, the pricing has gone up significantly as well. I's no surprise that people are looking at cheaper alternatives .
The Raspberry Pi ecosystem saves you more time than the hardware costs
Asking price isn't the only cost
In a strange way, buying a Raspberry Pi is a little like buying an Apple product. Yes, it costs more, but you're gaining access to an ecosystem, not just a single piece of hardware.
The amount of resources you can find online is enormous. There are years of documentation, troubleshooting, tutorials and more. This means that you'll probably get your problem sorted faster or your project completed sooner than with a less popular brand of SBC.
Time, as they say, is money. So you have to ask yourself if it's worth the additional time it would take to get things running on a more obscure SBC. Saving $20 in hardware costs probably isn't worth days of debugging.
Software support is where most cheap rivals fall apart
It's the chicken and the egg problem again
Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi community is a major value-add without a doubt, but don't forget that the official support for these little computers is also pretty fantastic. Raspberry Pi OS is a mature Linux distro that's had plenty of time in the oven, and receives active and enthusiastic support and development.
The Pi imager utility makes it incredibly easy to get the right OS for the Pi you have within minutes, and by itself is almost worth the price of entry. Likewise, even if you step outside the official OS builds, drivers for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPU, and everything else are mature, stable and readily understood for Pi hardware.
There's a better selection of hardware upgrades
There's a HAT for that
Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is in a similar position to the IBM PC in the late '80s. Since it became so popular and (accidentally) became an open hardware platform, just about everyone who made hardware back then made it for IBM PCs and IBM PC clones.
The Pi was designed as an accessible, broadly-documented platform from the start, and popularity came later. Regardless, most of the hardware upgrades for SBCs out there will be Pi-first in their focus. It also helps that Raspberry Pis have the "HAT" system where you can expand the basic board with new IO or even additional processors, allowing for functions like accelerated local AI.
Some non-Pi SBCs will try to be "Pi-compatible" with hardware add-ons designed for the Raspberry Pi family, but there's no guarantee that they'll work as advertised.
Long-term support matters more than raw specs
It's a marathon, not a sprint
For a lot of people, playing with an SBC is just a hobby, and they're doing something new every week. For others, these little single-board computers become part of a long-term installation. For example, I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that I use as a retro media center PC, connected to my old Sony CRT TV. I'd like it to keep doing that job for many years if possible, and I have little doubt it will keep getting updates for years to come.
Other people may have less frivolous uses, such as robotics or home network applications that are expected to stay functional for as long as possible. In that case spending a few dollars more on the hardware makes sense.
Raspberry Pi rivals still make sense for specific advanced projects
I'm not trying to say that you should avoid non-Pi SBCs entirely. They have specific uses for which they may be better than the equivalent Pi, or they may just suit your needs more closely.
The only real point here is that if you're buying a more obscure SBC simply to pay less money for the hardware, you might be fooling yourself in the long run.
