The Raspberry Pi is currently the most popular computer board in the market, but as you probably know it is not the only one. In this article we are going to tell you what are the best alternatives to Raspberry Pi 4 , which share most features but expand the range of options for which we can use the device.
You can do many things with a Raspberry Pi, but it is not the only computer board and, of course, in the end the options offered are limited. Some computer boards that we are going to show you below are simpler and cheaper , and others are much more complete but also more expensive . Of course, it will not be because there are no alternatives to the Raspberry Pi 4.
Onion Omega 2 Plus
This is one of the cheapest Raspberry Pi 4 alternatives on the market, although it is true that it is rather an IoT chip. It works with LEDE (Linux Embedded Development Environment), a Linux distribution based on OpenWRT.
NVIDIA Jetson Nano
This is the counterpart, because it is one of the most expensive alternatives, but also more complete because, in fact, it is a mini PC. In this case, it is oriented to artificial intelligence (for its SDK more than anything), but provides up to 472 GFLOPs of power.
ASUS Tinker Board S
This is another of the alternatives to Raspberry Pi 4 more complete than there is, because again it is a whole functional mini PC, not just a development board. It has the same 40-pin connector that we find in the Raspberry but offers a more modern processor and GPU. It should be noted that it incorporates 16 GB of eMMC memory as standard, so unlike Raspberry it does not need a micro SD card to work.
Arduino Mega 2560 R3
This development board is oriented to robotics and 3D printers, and has a fundamental difference with respect to RasPi, as it does not have a processor as such but a microcontroller (in this case an ATmega 2560 at 16 MHz).
Rock64 Media Board
This development board is another of the best alternatives to Raspberry Pi 4, because it has a faster processor and twice the memory costing almost the same. It has a 4-core Rockchip RK3328 ARM processor and supports up to 4 GB of LPDDR3 memory.
ODROID-XU4
Another alternative. It is a development board that practically does the same as the Raspberry Pi, but in this case it incorporates a powerful Samsung Exynos 5422 processor with eight cores at 2 GHz and another four cores at 1.3 GHz Cortex A7. It has 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM and a Mali T628 MP6 GPU.
Beagleboard PocketBeagle
This device is incredibly small, and more closely resembles a Raspberry Pi Zero. Its fundamental use is to connect it via USB to a terminal and to be able to use a Linux in it.
Banana Pi BPI M3
The famous Banana Pi is, of course, another option we have if we don’t want a Raspberry. This model is equipped with a quad-core A31S ARM Cortex A7 processor, POWERVR SGX544MP2 GPU and 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM.
Orange Pi Zero
Orange Pi Zero is another very complete and cheaper development board than Raspberry Pi. TG has a quad-core processor and supports up to 512 MB of RAM, with the particularity that it has serial WiFi.
NanoPi M4
We arrived at the last alternative with the NanoPi M4, a very expensive alternative but that will give us many options, since we can buy it with 2 or 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, with and without a heatsink, and many other options.
