What are some good Raspberry Pi alternatives?

I would pick up a late model i3, put it into a mini-ITX board and case.

This is what I did for some NAS servers that I wanted to be compact, support QuickSync transcoding for Plex, and support a SAS PCI card that breaks out to (8) 10Tb HDDs in a ZFS configuration. Not that the Pi is bad or anything but I see people trying to use them as routers and NAS and the performance isn’t fantastic, maybe on par with an intel chip from 10 years ago. You’d be much better grabbing some old PC hardware on eBay and throwing parts together.

When it comes to direct RPI competitors, there's Pine64's RockPro64 https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

Considering you've listed no requirements whatsoever that you'd want, which the raspberry pi can't meet (or any at all): how about a raspberry pi? It does have a big advantage in software support and documentation over various competitor boards

Depends on the project you want to do.

Many projects dealing with IoT or sensors can be made using ESP32s or the various Audrinos.

If you want a mini computer, there are some built on the Atom or similar. The price can be similar when looking at ones with an eMMC, case, etc vs a Pi with similar attributes.

There are a couple other options out there, but I dont even remember the names.

Software support is so crucial. I can't stress that enough. There is a huge amount of work to prepare the kernel and overlays for a new board and many manufacturers do the bare minimum.

My experience with vendors who do this well are Asus tinkerboard, NVIDIA Jetson (well... I'm being kind there) and from what I've heard the pine products. Basically go to armbian and look for the boards with the most mature support.

I've been working with dozens of these things for the last 4 years and the amount of issues due to poor kernel support saddens me. So much wasted time, they can be amongst the most expensive computers you can buy.

(not the OP obviously) but here is my sense of "why":

I would like something with less blob dependency. Pi still have opaque elements in the SoC. Booting from attached media is a bit of "do this magic to one-time state in your board"

I would like more high speed disk. I got a JMicron controller for my Pi4 NAS, but I'm behind one USB bus. I think there are methods here which have less USB in the path to disk, and more controller choices.

Having a good Android port is becoming as important as the more classic UNIX experience via Linux/BSD

ODroid always has nice boards: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2/

Nvidia Jetson Nano - similar to a Pi but more optimised for ML/AI stuff (though I think the RPi 4 has closed that gap somewhat)

Intel NUC - a great step up if you’re using your Pi for Home Automation (eg Home Assistant) and want something more robust/powerful. Likewise if you’re running PiHole or Docker. I have a NUC running VMware ESXI with Home Assistant, PiHole and a couple of other Docker containers and VMs. Most of these started on RPis but I decided I wanted something a bit more beefy. I also backup the VMs to my Synology using the Synology’s superb ESXi compatible backup software which is so good I tend to want to put everything in ESXi now and I’ll often create tiny Linux VMs for applications which I would previously have used a Pi for.

Arduino (or similar) - not strictly an alternative but a good step down in price and complexity for things that don’t need a full blown computer (simple robotics or home automation components/sensors).

Apple Pie - great if you don’t like raspberries. Fully wireless and nice with custard or ice cream.

https://beagleboard.org/

I've been looking at this for the last couple of days. The ones I've seen that are relatively cheap include orange pi and nanopi. Nanopi seems to have slightly better adoption, but orange pi is not far behind, is cheaper on Alibaba, and most of their devices are supported by mainline/armbian. I'll probably go for orange pi zero2. The Allwinner chipset is great.

Balena (formerly resin) publishes a list of supported devices for their OS. It’s been a good list to work from.

https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/hardware/devices/

I saw this in one other comment, but it bears repeating:

ESP32

Is it to hook up hardware that the standard Raspberry Pi doesn't support out of the box (ie: SATA, m.2, PCI-E)?

If so, you could look at some carrier boards for the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module, which might grant you more flexibility while still being in the Pi ecosystem.

For example, I'm waiting after the Wiretrustee SATA board (https://www.crowdsupply.com/wiretrustee/wiretrustee-sata) to make a compact Pi-based NAS.

Since OP doesn't list any requirements, I'll throw one in.

I have a product where I need to display fullscreen Websites on a TV.

I started building a simple Android TV app to take advantage of the fact that non technical users can configure them more easily (wifi etc) and things are less likely to break (updates etc) but of course I don't like being dependent on their app store.

Anyone know any other hardware that is fairly cheap (since we literally just display a website) but also comes with ease of use for non technical folks?

Xilinx Kria K26 SOM. It’s a lot of hardware for $199. Lead times are not great but otherwise has a lot of potential. They have a starter kit that’s aimed at vision AI applications and it comes with Raspberry Pi camera compatible interfaces.

https://www.xilinx.com/products/som/kria/kv260-vision-starte...

I'd certainly love something that's not ARM and doesn't require me to go thru hoops to get simple SSH running (aka headless first)

https://archlinuxarm.org has some great alternatives.

The fitlet 2 is really nice, I have one and it's been rock solid. https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/

You don't state your use case. Do you need a small device with lots of network connections? http://espressobin.net/tech-spec/

I find old laptops and VMs are better in most use cases outside of utilizing the GPIO pins. With laptops you also get all of the peripherals and a battery backup.

Check out Armbian.

https://www.armbian.com/download

I'm waiting for RISC-V RPi alternative. RISC-V is taking over, many startups forming.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e. Very nice form factor. I bought a refurbished one from eBay, very good price.