Raspberry Pi vs Banana Pi: What Are the Differences?

There are several options for miniature computers. Raspberry Pi is probably the most well-known brand. It usually appears first in Google search results and has the largest community of manufacturers. However, it is not the only company that makes these tiny machines. There are several others available as well. You may have also come across Banana Pi, which makes similar products. Both Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi make single-board computers (SBCs) and sound more like delicious desserts. The products even look quite similar, with the obvious exception that Banana Pi motherboards are blue, while Raspberry Pi’s are green. So it is understandable that you might wonder what separates these two brands and their products.

To fully understand the differences between the Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi, we should consider who makes them, what they offer, what specifications their models have, and what projects you can do with them. Knowing this, you should be able to make an informed decision about which one will be the best fit for your next project.

It’s worth looking at the companies that make both. Raspberry Pi has been making and selling small-form-factor computers since 2012, when British inventor Eben Upton released his first commercial model. Since then, the company has evolved, offering increasingly powerful models to meet growing computing demands. Raspberry Pi not only produces a wide range of open-source SBC computers and accessories with a suite of compatible open-source software, but also maintains a forum where makers and developers can share their projects, encouraging outside development. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity dedicated to improving computer, engineering, and coding skills in children, also operates under the auspices of Raspberry Pi LTD, where Upton still holds sway as the company’s CEO.

The team behind Banana Pi was founded in 2015. It is led by Guangdong Bipai Technology, based in Dongguan, China, in partnership with Taiwan Hon Hai Technology. The company has also built its reputation by producing boards, accessories, and open-source software, as well as sharing its architectural design with its customers. Banana Pi also has a respected forum full of free projects. Its overall business model seems very similar to that of the Raspberry Pi, with the main difference simply being its smaller scale.

There are currently 10 models of the Raspberry Pi SBC in production. These are the Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero W, Zero 2 W, 1 Model A+, 1 Model B+, 3 Model A+, 3 Model B, 3 Model B+, 4 Model B, and the new Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi Zero SBC series is less powerful than the numbered Pi, but it also sells for a much lower price. This makes them popular options for those who want to do projects that require a computer for basic processes, but don’t necessarily need a lot of memory or processing power. The Pi 5 is at the other end of the spectrum. It’s a big step up from the previous generation, which even has the processing power to do things like emulate PS2 games.

The Banana Pi may not have been around as long as the Raspberry Pi, but there are a lot more units in production now. The company’s website currently lists 25 SBC models. The BPI-M5 has gained a lot of popularity over the past few years when it was seen as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi 4, but the most powerful option the company currently has available is the BPI-M7.

Next, let’s take a look at the specs. It would take too long to review every single SBC in both companies’ catalogs, so instead, let’s focus on their top performers. The Raspberry Pi 5 is powered by a quad-core Broadcom BCM2712 Arm Cortex A76 processor clocked at 2.4GHz and comes in 4GB and 8GB RAM variants. It has a VideoCore VII GPU, dual 4Kp60 HDMI output, a 4Kp60 HEVC decoder, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a few other features.

The Banana Pi M7 is powered by an octa-core Rockchip RK3588 processor, a 64-bit CPU clocked at 2.4GHz, and a dedicated 6TOPS NPU for AI processing. It comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB RAM variants and has a built-in 64GB or 128GB eMMC for storage. It supports WiFi 6, 8K video encoding and decoding, has two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, Bluetooth 5.0, and HDMI 2.1 up to 8Kp60FPS.

Both of these SBCs are powerful, but the specs suggest that the flagship M7 has the upper hand in almost every metric, especially when it comes to AI and multi-core tasks. It has twice the cores, matches the frequency, comes in larger memory variants, and even includes a dedicated NPU. This would be bad news for the Raspberry Pi, if it weren’t for the fact that the M7 is so much more expensive.

Each of the SBCs produced by both companies offers a wide range of different applications, but one of the biggest differences between them is the much larger community of private developers designing applications for the Raspberry Pi hardware, architecture, and software systems.

In addition to the official Raspberry Pi forum, you can find dozens of projects listed on sites like Reddit, Tom’s Hardware, Instructables, All3DP, and even here on SlashGear. There are Raspberry Pi projects for your kitchen, home office, garage, living room, bedroom, backyard, outdoor garden, and just about any other space you can imagine. This network of community resources is one of the brand’s greatest assets.

The Banana Pi community isn’t that big. There are a few projects for the company’s SBC. There are a few on the official forum, and Ionos and hackster.io list a dozen or so. It seems like the Banana Pi is much more suited to tinkerers and developers who want to create their own projects than to makers who want to follow or customize pre-made projects.

As we mentioned, mini-PCs are not the only products these companies produce. Both have also developed several accessories and additional components that are designed to work with their SBCs and expand their capabilities.

Raspberry Pi sells dozens of cases, peripherals, cables, and cameras. It also sells desktop kits, compute modules, debug probes, HATs, DACs, AMPs, and I/O boards. One of the more interesting new releases is the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, which adds a new neural network inference accelerator built around the Hailo-8L chip, giving the Pi 5 machine learning capabilities beyond the basic SBC.

Banana Pi also offers an impressive range of accessories. The company sells a variety of open-source router boards for creating your own home network, AI boards, IoT boards, and industrial controls. The selection isn’t as extensive, though, and a quick search of Amazon reveals that there aren’t that many third-party options designed to work with Banana Pi. Many third-party accessories designed to work with the Raspberry Pi SBC can also work with Banana Pi, but few of them are marketed as compatible, so buying them is a bit of a gamble.

One of the most appealing features of SBCs is their relatively low price. This is what allows most DIYers and tinkerers to use them in so many different projects. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is the company’s cheapest option, with an MSRP of just $14.99. This makes it ideal for very simple projects that require very little processing power and where the creator wants to save as much money as possible. The most powerful unit, the Raspberry Pi 5, is also not super expensive. You can buy the 8GB version for just $79.99. The company’s other boards are priced in between these two, giving buyers a wide range of power levels to choose from in a moderate price range.

Banana Pi pricing is a bit more erratic. It’s hard to find any of them at regular US prices, but you can sometimes find good deals. The cheapest SBC it makes is the Banana Pi M2 Zero, which is currently available on Amazon for $19.99. That puts it in a similar price range to the cheapest Raspberry Pi option. The M7 isn’t even close to the price of the Pi 5. It’s listed on Amazon for $214.99, and it seems to be similarly priced at other retailers. That’s more than three times the price of the Pi 5.