good alternatives to raspberry pi which are cheap and efficient?

Compact business desktops like others have mentioned are great. Depending on your needs, I also like using older or used laptops. They’re still power efficient if you get a recent processor model, people sell them for fairly cheap used, and sometimes having an attached keyboard and display is more convenient than having to hook up a crash cart

Go on eBay and look for “tiny” or USFF boxes. Dell, HP, and Lenovo make various models of 1L units that are commonly available. Just make sure to do some research on what the specific hardware capabilities are to make sure they satisfy your needs.

Source: my router is a Lenovo m920q tiny with an eBay dual SFP+ 10G NIC running pfSense 2.7.

Thin clients off eBay. I picked up a Dell Wyse with 8gb memory, 4 cores, 16g emmc, and a 256G M.2 SSD for about $40. Includes the case, power supply, power button, etc. Still uses very little power. Install the x86_64 version of dietPi on that and it's been Rock solid running my docker projects.

Also picked up and HP T620 with similar specs. Haven't started using it yet but I expect similar results.

Much better deal than RPi and for most use cases equal or better able to do the job.

A used NUC blows a raspi out of the water performance-wise, and they use surprisingly little power when not under load. I run proxmox with a NAS, pihole and homeassistant on a NUC from 2015, and it draws around 9W.

If you want embedded boards Rockchip and Sunxi/AllWinner are pretty well supported by the Linux kernel. Go have a look at boards with full Armbian support, that's usually a good shortcut to finding one.

My preference runs to the Nanopi boards, they're better built than Orange Pi hardware. You're going to see a lot of Orange Pi recommendations based on cost but be aware that they're not all that well made and occasionally have reliability problems. I was pretty chuffed for my $20 Orange Pi zero until I realized that the WiFi basically had zero chance of working reliably. Pick models carefully after reading about people's experiences with them on the Armbian forums so you can avoid duds.

If you don't need embedded arm check out the thin client selection on eBay. You can buy a J5005 Dell/Wyse thin client for like $100, some models even have a low profile pcie slot (these cost a bit more because they're desirable as pf/OPNsense platforms.) These make pretty solid Proxmox or container host platforms, or you can use them for their intended purpose and jam in a low profile graphics card.

My personal "I don't feel like spending $150 on a 4gb pi" favorite is the HP T630 thin client. On a good day you'll find an 8gb RAM model with the power brick for <$60 shipped. Do the eBay thing with any of these and try to best offer the price down a bit if it's an option.

If you want to step up a notch check out the HP T730, this one comes with a pcie slot and makes a fairly decent Proxmox virtualized router host. They're usually available for <$130/shipped or less. The HP T740 is the same thing with a Zen1 embedded SoC, those run ~$220 or so and support NVMe. The Wyse 5070 offers Celeron or Pentium options and is a <10W machine, the J5005 version actually works pretty well as a hardware transcoding PLEX host (provided you're not transcoding 4k.)

The T730 and T630 use SATA m.2 storage, the 5070 and T640 support NVMe. All of these have an m.2 A+E key slot for WiFi or an extra 2230 NIC.

I'd recommend an x86 board because as great as the RPI and similar can be, ARM just doesn't have the same support for a lot of things you might want to self host. I personally like to spring for a used thinclient PC off of eBay, because they have about the same resources as a Raspberry Pi but on an x86 platform. With my thin clients I typically install Alpine but a really light Debian install could work as well, and then from there you can go about installing Docker etc for a little homelab. Even better, if you get lucky and get a couple of them you could mess around with clustering them and some light Kubernetes at home. I've got mine running PiHole and Unbound on Alpine to serve my whole house with DNS and it works great. I don't think I've had hardly any downtime issues or anything of that sort.

TL;DR: try a couple cheap thin clients from eBay and you can run some light stuff on them for cheap.

I'm a big fan of dell wyse machines. Loads on ebay, ex business machines. X86 so decent support, decent dell power supply, on / off button / in cases and low power.

I have wyse 3040 for pihole cost 39.99

I have wyse 5070 with windows 10 for plex and running a Ubuntu 22 server in virtual box, cost 59.99

Pine64 single board computers. Rock64, Rockpro64, Quartz64

I migrated on to a NUC. They seem to have the right mix of performance and power efficiency, for me. The i3 processor also means you're not dealing with the extra complexity of Arm64.

I got a mini pc (e.g. a NUC). I did this after the price for rasps went sky high. Check out used NUCs, you can get a lot of power for the price.

I use Hardkernel products for my kid's PCs, as pihole, etc. Their products are sold under the Odroid brand. I have the Odroid C1 and C4 line of SBCs and they work as expected. The C1 used to be my mediaplayer, now it runs a game server and pihole. A little older, but it still has use.

Thin clients! $30, sometimes $15, for just as much CPU power as the Pi. More power usage, though. And ensure you buy the cables and SSD, check carefully what the seller is including or excluding from the shipment.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #214 for this sub, first seen 13th Oct 2023, 14:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

What you are after is basically a server. Your next logical step if Pi is not enough - Intel NUC.

I like fanless PCs. Some have gpio headers for home automation purposes.

For just self-hosting, I'd probably like using refurbished laptops. Seems nuts, but low power, included input and screen, built in UPS, and sometimes you can get them for like 100 bucks. You can just use a USB or wifi device for home automation purposes if need be.

Used an rpi4 for a year as a media server and was quite happy but wanted to run a few more things so I switched to an i3 NUC11 and I really like it. Running an arr stack + plex + jellyfin + nextcloud and its using 7w 'idle' (mentioned services running) with a headless debian 12. Fit a 5TB HDD in it and a 1TB nvme. 16GB or ram. It definitely runs faster and jellyfin is actually usable. Still though, rpi4 can handle the load (sans jellyfin). The rpi5 will also fit into this market very well.

Jellyfin recommends not using SBCs. I was in the same boat as you a month ago. Started on an RPi. Works fine for raw (no transcoding). Poor performance if you do any scrubbing or try to watch something while new content is processing. Got a mini PC. It was better but its basically a laptop chipset, so still not the best experience. Had other things I wanted to do on my self-hosted setup so decided to just bite the bullet and make a proper build: 12th gen i5, Intel Arc GPU, 4+8 SATA ports with PCI card, 3xNVME, 10xHDD/SSD case. Can't speak to the performance yet. Learning Ansible to automate managing it including installing the OS.

I would stay away from NAS systems like QNAP or Synology. They tend to not be much better than a SBC.

For the budget constraints I would just echo getting the cheapest desktop-class PC you can get your hands on in a suitable form factor.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/#hardware-acceleration-on-docker-linux

While hardware acceleration is supported on Raspberry Pi hardware, it is recommended that Jellyfin NOT be hosted on Raspberry Pis or other SBCs. Many hardware acceleration features are not supported and will fallback to software. In addition, they are generally too slow to provide a good experience when transcoding is needed. Please consider getting a more powerful system to host Jellyfin.

Second hand thin clients (like the dell wyse already mentioned) are often cheap and easy to use https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

OrangePi is pretty nice. Built in 8gb eMMC module is a huge performance boost. Only $60 with case and PSU.

Just look for a NUC with an Intel N100 with passive cooling.

The RK3566 and RK3588 alternatives are pretty good, and there are a bunch of them from different companies.

I have a 3566 myself as a compatible alternative to a CM4, and it does its job just fine.

I'm current using a refurbished business Lenovo mini PC. I've seen a similar model with i7 and 16GB of RAM for about $170 on Amazon. There are also mini PC's using NXXX model Intel CPU's with a TDP of 10w, but I don't think you can upgrade parts on those.

I’ve used lots of different boards. The Radxa Rock 3c is cheap and has decent performance, but the official OS support is a bit old. The Libre Computer boards are also good and have Armbian support. Libre Computer is releasing a couple more this year too. BananaPi has good options that aren’t expensive, like the BananaPi M5. Friendly Elec has some boards like the NanoPi R2C and R5C that aren’t pricey and have Armbian support. Any one of these boards are fine for a small home lab. Just boot Armbian, install Docker, and add your containers.

I haven't actually tried it since I'm still a beginner in selfhosting, but I was planning to buy a dedicated hardware for my homeland and my main two choices were the new Raspberry Pi 5 or some mini-PC like the one in this video I don't know if it could be similar to what you are looking for...

I've recently been looking into ESP32 programming - they're microcontrollers with onboard Bluetooth and WiFi, that are smaller yet more powerful than Arduinos. Randomnerdtutorials gets recommended a lot elsewhere; I believe I saw one tutorial for running a web server on an ESP32.

If you need a full OS and/or more resources, I'm not sure raspberry pi can be beaten (at least, that's how the market was years ago when I was looking)

Rock 64 or zimaboard are some other alternatives. Iirc they're around the same price range though.

Not as cheap as the wyse, but probably way more powerful.

Framework sells a case to turn their mainboard into an SFF pc.

https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case-and-mainboard-kit

I'm a big fan of dell wyse machines. Loads on ebay, ex business machines. X86 so decent support, decent dell power supply, on / off button / in cases and low power.

I have wyse 3040 for pihole cost 39.99

I have wyse 5070 with windows 10 for plex and running a Ubuntu 22 server in virtual box, cost 59.99

I know you want an upgrade over rPi but If you want a cheaper option, you can buy an android box and install linux on it. most of them have unlocked bootloaders. you can usually find a ready to use .iso on Armbian community forums by searching the SOC model there.

Personally I run a 5$ android box. it has a quad core cpu + 2GB of ram. I use it for hosting my music library on an external hdd and streaming 1080p video. I also set it as my vpn gateway. It's enough for my use case so I didn't upgrade it.

My current server runs on a fan less embedded Celeron board from ASRock, it runs really well... But since I've upgraded my desktop, I'm building a Ryzen server now