Raspberry Pi alternatives for headless self hosted applications
Since rpis have been almost impossible to find, I've been looking around for alternatives for some local self hosted services like home assistant. A lot of boards seem to talk about GPU, GPIO pins, etc. But I really just want a single board, fanless (low power), decent CPU and RAM, ethernet.
Any recommendations?
This is slightly different, but in this rpi drought, I've set up proxmox on an old laptop and have several VMs/LXC/containers running on it. It fills that same role for me. I don't know exactly what the power cost comparison is, but it's gotta beat several rpis running simultaneously.
2nd this - great way to have tons of flexibility
I have a similar setup but with a lenovo tiny pc.
Another advantage is that I no longer have to worry about sd cards randomly dying
The Orange Pi 5 or Orange Pi 3 LTS are solid options, depending on your budget and how much horsepower you need.
If you don't care about GPIO/serial lines, frankly buy a small NUC or a used Thinkcentre M93p. Used, you can find them for very cheap (£100 in my case), they are powerful enough for your needs, you can have an actual SSD storage, and you will avoid the odd issue with a software not working on ARM (less and less the case but still worth taking into account).
I'll second the NUC--I use one as an HTPC and another as a headless server. Both run quiet, though there is a single small fan. Can't speak to power usage though.
Old laptop or PC. I use an intel NUC for mine. Hosting 30 docker containers
Intel NUC running Ubuntu.
This is what I use but with Debian. I had an older NUC 8 i5 lying around so I decided to drop 32GB of RAM and a new 1TB NVME drive into it. The performance is way better than a Pi and the measured power consumption at the wall socket is under 5 watts idle (peaks at around 13-15 watts under load if I recall correctly).
In terms of noise level, if I start loading the CPU heavily the fan can be noticeable .. however at idle or when it's just streaming Plex content to my TV (without transcoding), it doesn't make any fan noises at all.
rock64 works pretty good for my use case as a 700 mbit router.
I've heard good things about the rockpi.
I've got a Rock64 running OpenMediaVault with about 6-10 Docker containers. Works great and the power consumption is very minimal (~1A).
That’s honestly pretty impressive. Well done.
Thanks! It's installed on my sailboat, so the primary concern was efficiency from a power perspective. I wanted something I could run off 12V DC with the lowest possible power consumption that would still do the job.
I've got it running the Jellyfin/Radarr/Sonarr/Sabnzbd stack for media server purposes and PiHole for DNS. Even with DDclient and Wireguard containers running, the CPU utilization at idle averages around 25%.
The OrangePi 5 is one of the better options right now. Starts at $80 for a 4GB (RAM) model and goes all the way up to a 32GB model. CPU is roughly twice as good as an rpi 4, so if you want you can underclock it with no fan and get solid perf still
The 5 just came out this year and I don't think it has an LTS model. Are you sure you didn't get a 3 LTS or a 4 LTS?
Lots of cheep SFF/thin client machines on eBay.
hp t530 or dell wyse 3040 or 5070 thin clients
Do they have a fan that will get noisy after a while?
I bought a £20 thin client off of eBay to use as a simple file/Emby/pihole and Pivpn server running Ubuntu Server LTS for my home lab
Works great.
It’s not that difficult to get a Pi 4. I wrote a python script that scraped rpilocator’s rss feed every 5 minutes and would notify my phone when one was available in the US. It went off basically every day around 8:30am PST when Adafruit would drop 100+ Pi4s. I’ve picked up two in the past week (one for my Voron printer and another for a RetroPi cabinet). They did sell out fairly fast.. in about 10 minutes or so.
Sorry I have to laugh at this. If you have to write a script for it even if the script is easy there’s no way I can consider it “not hard”. Not hard is just being able buy it like anything else.
I get what you’re saying though.
I didn’t realize it would be so easy when I wrote the script. Knowing what I know now I’d just check adafruit every couple minutes starting a bit before 8:30am PST.
Hard for a "layperson", maybe. But IMHO for someone interested in self-hosting this probably should not be a hard problem to solve, or at least a decent "warmup exercise" to see if you'd like it.
I say this because you don't even need to write the script yourself, there are plenty of preexisting applications that can be configured to notify you of updates to an RSS feed.
I'm sure I could whip that up in changedetection.io or Node-RED pretty quickly, for example.
I don't use a dedicated RSS feed reader app, but I'd also be somewhat surprised if there isn't one that supports some form of push notifications.
The thing is that right now it's not worth it to buy a raspberry pi if you want to selfhost. It is 4 years old at this point but it cost 50% more than when it was released.
Power wise you are absolutely correct. It is not the best performance value anymore. However, support for the Pi4 is much more robust when using them in specific projects designed to use them.
For everything else I have a much beefier Unraid server that hosts all of my dockers and VMs.
Of the alternatives available, Libre Computer, Pine64 and Orange/Banana Pi all offer options that fit what you're looking for. You can generally find these on Amazon, eBay etc at a reasonable price.
Thin client! They're significantly more powerful than a pi and you can grab them for nothing on eBay and you can use the nvme slots for storage, I've had sd cards go bad in pis
a cheap second hand laptop will be both faster and will have better wattage and what is basically an internal UPS
alternatively any used thin client will do well to. Cost around 50 bucks and has waaaay more power than a pi while not consuming much more.
i prefer the laptop due to impossibility of a brown out / blackout affecting it. it is basically an active ups
That's true - as long as the battery does not catch fire :D
Are you using any charging utility? Like Macbooks are drawing power from Power brick as long as the battery is full. Still they are sometimes discharging to around 50% to keep the cells alive.
nah laptops in the last 5 years have features like that so you dont need to worry about all that. most have them in the bios too so no weird software needed
I don't need to run amd64 containers, so I like the Orange Pi 5 for raw ARM compute. For $149 you can get one with 16GB of RAM, an NVMe slot and 8 cores, all for < 15 watts.
If you're looking for something to be a disk server, the Odroid HC4 doesn't have as many cores or RAM but it does have 2 SATA slots in a toaster configuration.
Aliexpress has some reasonably affordable fanless mini PCs. Not quite as low power but you can run a heap of containers on them since they are more powerful and x86 and some of them have multiple ethernet ports which can be useful for router purposes etc
I gave up on using raspberry pi for running servers.
I ended up buying a $60 lenovo on ebay https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-tiny-guide-and-ce-review/2/ and then loaded it up with 32GB of ram. Now I run a proxmox hypervisor and around 20+ containers/VMs. Best decision I ever made. I just spin up servers willy nilly
If you don't need GPIO then run a hypervisor. Cheaper than SBCs and more useful.
I use a pi for servers because of the assumption that it uses very little power to run (compared to say, an old unused laptop), is that not the case?
Sure, but I just told you I'm running over 20 servers. Try running 20 raspberry pi's 😀
My resources are being shared for around 20W of power.
Pis consume lower power, but are less powerful also. I think thr Power Consumption VS Performance is way better on Tiny/Mini/Micros. The Pi4 may idle at 3-4W where a 8th gen USSF will idle at 6-8W, but will provide more than 2x the performance IMO.
I prefer paying almost the same price for a USSF with an i5-8500T than a Pi, even if it consume more, idle under 10W is great, and they let you go up to 65W if needed!
The Libre “Le Potato” is nice:
https://libre.computer/products/aml-s905x-cc/
Seconding this. Just bought yet another potato a few minutes ago.
Thin Clients are the way to go! I got a Dell Wyse 5010 for cheap on ebay and replaced the internal 8 GB DOM memory with a 1TB SSD so it's basically a NAS now.
It does take a little DIY (video) but after that it runs more performant than RPis I've had in the past
After running Plex off a pi for like 6 years I think I'm finally about to graduate to a old PC in my closet
Why are rpis hard to find? Are they not making as many anymore?
Still feeling the effects of the Chip Shortage of 2020-2022. They are still making a lot of pi's, but they have a huge backlog to work away. Large contracts get priority over distributors, unfortunately, so they are very hard to find.
https://rpilocator.com/ scrapes the web and displays available stock. Managed to get a rpi4 8GB a couple of weeks ago.
I had no idea either they were getting scarce - is it just the really decent ones or the older ones too I wonder
Pretty much all of them unfortunately. Although claims have been made that the situation should get better in the second half of 2023. It's about time tho, all pi models have been out of stock for at least 2 years at this point
WHAT wow... And here I am using my little 4 to display a dakboard :/ I had a B+ and gave it away since it was so slow but that was 2017 hah
I'm using one for my brewery as a controller. If that one dies I'm in trouble.
Chip shortage really hit them hard... At some point I even had a Firefox extension that would send me a notification when they were available somewhere.
It's supposed to get better by the end of the year though.
Chip shortage combined with scalpers.
Get a mini pc/NUC with an intel j4125 or better and it will be a great little streaming powerhouse for jellyfin. Usually can grab one for < $150
Lewis from Everything Smart Home dropped a video a few weeks back, telling us about the Zimaboard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr7vo9NAWfo low power, fanless, single board etc.
I have an Odroid c2 for that purpose. Low power but powerful enough to be used for home automation. The c2 is a bit older so there are probably newer versions. https://www.hardkernel.com/
I have a C2 as well and I think the C4 is the newest of that series. I'm personally running an Odroid-N2+ for HA and it's awesome. Using HA + Add ons for a powerhouse of self hosting. The Home Assistant Blue is also based on the N2+ so support isnt an issue.
Look for secondhand thin clients such as HP T620. They're usually can be had for $30 or less (or more) depending on the configuration. They also have low power usage, not as low as a pi, but still low enough (<10 W).
Hi SirPyschoMantis,
I'm certainly no expert but just recently started a similar project you are describing. I went with a used HP ProDesk 400 G2 mini. It has a i5-6500t, 8GB and 250GB ssd.
I run Ubuntu server on it with docker. It's compact and capable of running a bit more then a Raspberry Pi I believe.
When searching for a Pi alternative I also came across a similar mini pc from Dell. Thats was a Dell OptiPlex 3040 SFF.
I'm from the Netherlands and used prices here were around 100-150 €.
Second this, but don't go for the dell minis. I have had trouble with them no recognizing 3rd party power supplies that are often shipped with refurb units.
I've had good luck with the lenovo tiny PCs.
I'm ve been on the hunt for an alternative as well, but because I need a bit more RAM and CPU since it's for a media center a lot of the alternatives are not good enough. The OrangePi seems like it could be one, but both it and the Raspberry are so expensive currently that I don't think either is worth at the moment, I'll just keep running out of my laptop for the time being.
I finally got around to using an old PINE64 SBC and that’s worked well for me. Have thought about getting an Orange Pi5 with the RK3588. I’ve seen them on Amazon and AliExpress and I’ve been mostly eyeballing 16GB variants but they’ve come in around $70 to $150ish depending on the amount of RAM (4-16GB). There’s a 32GB variant but that’s overkill for most of my use cases.
There's a new orange pi5 with dual 2.5gb ethernet. Looks pretty nice.
I'm looking around for a SBC too, under 100$. Can't find stock of banana nor orange Pis. So i forgot about those. I like the features of the odroid boards, and the radxa rock boards. I'll probably buy the rock 4; seems like a good option.
OrangePi 5s are in stock on Amazon
This is definitely the way to go or a nanopi