If you’ve been following my articles here on XDA, you may already know that I love building DIY projects with my Raspberry Pi. Whether it’s putting together a weather station or creating a somewhat-functional Proxmox machine with the SBC, the Raspberry Pi has been by my side throughout my tinkering journey.

While I do consider the Raspberry Pi family a quintessential part of the Single-Board Computer landscape, rival SBCs have matured quite a lot over the last decade. In fact, here are a few reasons why you might want to switch to a non-Raspberry Pi board for your computing projects.

👁 Best single board computer
Best single board computers in 2025

If you've been thinking of tinkering with a SBC, we break down the most common ones and why you'd want them.

3 Better pricing

Especially for the high-end models

Long before becoming synonymous with the word SBC, the Raspberry Pi was designed as an inexpensive computing board to attract students to the dazzling world of coding. Unfortunately, that statement is no longer applicable to any Raspberry Pi board except the Zero lineup. Over the last couple of years, the prices of the mainline RPi models have steadily increased – to the point where the Raspberry Pi 5 had a $60 price tag at the time of its launch!

Even putting the supply issues aside for a moment, you’ll also need to grab an active cooler, memory card, display cables, and a couple of other accessories for the SBC. Once you move to the higher-end models, a 16GB variant of the RPi 5 can cost $120! At that price point, you can easily grab a mini-PC or motherboard with an embedded processor for your projects. Factor in the scalped prices charged by most retailers, and you’ll find better deals on rival boards from Radxa, Orange Pi, and Banana Pi.

While I understand that the mainline Raspberry Pi boards are designed for more hardcore projects, I wouldn’t complain this much if the hardware inside them wasn’t outdated by the time the RPi Foundation ends up releasing them…

2 Superior specifications

Newer RPi boards are vastly underpowered

The Raspberry Pi 5 may have the most powerful specs among its brethren, but once you compare it to the other SBC families, it stops being all that impressive. For starters, the ARM Cortex-A76 processor powering the Raspberry Pi 5 was released way back in 2018, nearly five years before the newest SBC hit the market.

On paper, similarly-priced SBCs from Radxa and Orange Pi tend to have beefier specs alongside better I/O. Heck, the RPi 5 even gets rid of hardware decoding and an AUX jack, with the former being especially useful in media-streaming setups. Sure, other ARM-based SBCs tend to lack the heavy software and OS support that their Raspberry Pi competitors are known for. But for specialized projects that you can build on any SBC, you’ll find the Raspberry Pi alternatives typically deliver better performance. And that’s before you throw x86 boards into the equation.

1 x86 architecture

No need to restrict your projects to ARM devices

Despite the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 microcontroller featuring RISC-V cores, its SBC siblings have remained locked into the ARM ecosystem. While the software support for Raspberry Pi boards is nothing short of amazing, they can’t hold a candle to x86 systems when it comes to OS compatibility and sheer performance.

I’ll use the Radxa X4 for this comparison. Besides costing the same as the 4GB variant of the Raspberry Pi 5, this x86 board can blow its ARM rival out of the water with its N100 processor. It’s also compatible with most Linux distros, server operating systems, and even Windows 11, which requires an infuriatingly tiresome process to configure on the Raspberry Pi.

If you don’t mind your SBC consuming more power, I daresay it’s almost always better to go with an x86 model over an ARM board like the Raspberry Pi.

Still, the Raspberry Pi continues to dominate the SBC ecosystem

Despite everything, there’s no denying that the Raspberry Pi family is the be-all and end-all series for SBC lovers. Leaving aside x86 systems, I’ve yet to find another SBC manufacturer that pays the same attention to the software aspect as the Raspberry Pi Foundation. You’re also covered on the accessories front, with the RPi’s GPIO pins supporting an armada of HATs and sensor modules. Plus, you get plenty of documentation to help you pick up the reins if you’re a newcomer to DIY projects.

👁 A Raspberry Pi 5 and a Raspberry Pi Zero W held close together
Best Raspberry Pi HATs

The Raspberry Pi is pretty useful on its own. But its utility skyrockets once you attach these nine HATs to the SBC

That said, I really hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation ups its game when developing newer boards. Considering other SBC manufacturers have started going full throttle on x86 devices, the uber-popular Raspberry Pi family might get dethroned if it doesn’t spice things up with more innovative features.

  • Raspberry Pi 5
    CPU
    Arm Cortex-A76 (quad-core, 2.4GHz)
    Memory
    Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM
    Operating System
    Raspberry Pi OS (official)
    Ports
    2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2x micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO header
    GPU
    VideoCore VII
    Starting Price
    $60
  • Radxa X4
    Storage
    M.2 M-key slot, eMMC storage (optional)
    CPU
    Intel N100
    Memory
    Up to 16GB LPDDR5
    Operating System
    Most x86 operating systems, Windows 11
    Ports
    3x USB 3.2 Gen 2, 1x USB 2.0, 1x 2.5GbE RJ45, 1x audio/microphone AUX jack, 40-pin GPIO
    Display
    2x micro-HDMI