I've heard people say that the Orange Pi is a "budget alternative" to the Raspberry Pi. On one hand, the Raspberry Pi has an excellent community, with a large user base that could really help you in your learning journey. On the other hand, the Orange Pi offers great value for money, and it's really tempting because the Raspberry Pi can be a bit pricey. What's your suggestion?

Depends on your use case.

If you need raw cpu power, better gpu or video processing, Go for RK3588/s based board.

If you heavily rely on GPIO and its functions (PWM, I2C,...) go for RPi.

You'll spend the money once. Then you'll have the result thereafter. I would suggest deciding what you want, then spending whatever it costs. Orange PI is "cheap", not just in price, but in hardware reliability as well as software support. I'm not aware of such issues with Radxa. RK3588 is more powerful than Raspberry PI, but as you say Raspberry PI has great community and support. Perhaps the question is - What do you need it for? Raspberry PI might be powerful enough for your needs.

Orange PI has very good hardware (better than RPI) but bad support of software from  factory devellopers. Raspberry PI 5 is a bit slower but we have more support and always new versions.

 

I have both.

I would always go RPi, as I have been burned going with a different board in the past. This may not be a fair reflection on the Orange Pi, as I can only speak for having purchased an Odroid C1+ many years ago.

 

The C1+ was a very capable board, and definitely more capable than the RPi offering at the time. However, there just is no substitute for the support and community around the RPi. I now have 3, and even my original RPi 1 Model B+ is still supported by the RPi foundation, and still gets modern kernel and OS updates. This is a board running off just 512MB RAM, A 700 MHz single-core 32-bit processer and released over 11 years ago. No one could complain if they had dropped support long ago, but they didn't, and they still show no signs of dropping support any time soon.

 

Hardkernel, on the other hand, pretty much dumped support for the Odroid C1+ as soon as it released, so it is stuck on a 3.x kernel and a uBoot from 2011. If it wasn't for the Armbian project this board just would not be useable, and even then, we are still stuck on a 15 year old uBoot solution.

 

None of this may be important to you, and like I say, my experience is not likely a like-for-like comparison with the Orange Pi, but the long term support you get from the RPi foundation and the wider community around it is not even close to being matched by any other vendor, and (personally) I don't like supporting vendors who effectively manufacture e-waste.

Edited November 19, 2025Nov 19 by torz77