SBC recommendation for a small server?

[immutability]

In one post here I saw a "please buy hardware we recommend" quote, and I appreciate that, but I wasn't able to find a recommended boards list - is there even one? Or should I just use the standard/platinum support filtering on the main page?

 

Anyway, I could also use some help / recommendation for a general purpose SBC as I ... didn't by one for years. I'm looking for a more recent SBC to run a small, low power server (think pihole, homeassistant, zigbee, etc). I don't have specific requirements, but I'd like the board to have some kind of "long term support" and I'd also like to choose something that the armbian team would recommend, maybe from a manufacturer that supports armbian directly, or at least provides good documentation. Headless install, may use GPIO, at least 3 USB ports, built-in ethernet + wifi + BT (not sure if there's an SBC that would support zigbee natively?). And also, avoid using an SD card. Ability to use eMMC or SSD would be important.

 

Where I'm coming from: I still run two first-gen Raspberry Pis as webcams + dataloggers (the 26 pin GPIO ones with 256 and 512 MB RAM respectively) and I used OrangePi One and Lite as two surprisingly stable servers for years (one a small postfix mailserver + datalogger, the other even running 4 docker containers). I like using low-level hardware to its limits🙂 I have recently upgraded to an already outdated OrangePi PC+ that I found in the drawer - at least it has 1 GB of RAM and I was starting running into limits with the 512 MB ones. So yeah - I don't need the top of the range SBC but something ... reasonably priced (think ~40 €) that will run well for years to come. I heard good stuff about the Radxa boards with Rockchip SoCs but I have no experience as I haven't bought new SBCs in ... years. Thanks in advance 🙂 

[Werner]

On 6/9/2025 at 5:55 PM, immutability said:

Or should I just use the standard/platinum support filtering on the main page?

tl;dr: Yes

 

Status of CSC boards  is unknown to the Armbian team. They probably work but could also be broken.

Standard and above are tested to some extend.

[immutability]

Sounds good, thank you Werner! 

 

If anyone wants to share their favorite boards then please go ahead too 🙂

[cyberbob]

for that price and feature set the odroid c4/c5 and the orange pi 5 (or 5b with onboard emmc) are the usual sweet spot. if you want zigbee i'd lean toward a board with proper usb (not just the otg ports some of the cheaper ones have) so your zigbee stick gets a clean port and a decent antenna position. one thing worth saying upfront from experience: skip the sd card for anything thats writing 24/7 like home assistant's database or pihole logs, you already know this but emmc or a small ssd over usb3 will save you a ton of corruption headaches down the line. and budget a few euro for a heatsink, the rk3588 boards in particular will thermal throttle in a closed case without one.

 

for the support angle werner's spot on, sticking to standard/platinum boards on the download page means kernel updates keep coming and you're not chasing a dead community image in a year. raspberry pi 4/5 is the boring-but-safe option if you can stretch the budget, just because the software ecosystem assumes it exists.

 

on the software side, since youre running pihole + HA + zigbee you'll basically be living in docker, which armbian-config can set up for you. if you ever want the rest of the self-host stack (nextcloud, file sync, vpn back in) without hand-rolling reverse proxy and certs, full disclosure im involved in an open source project called syncloud thats basically a thin layer that does one-click app installs and handles https/auth/updates for you on arm boards. its not for everyone, if you enjoy wiring up nginx and docker-compose yourself you'll probably find it too hands-off, but for a set-and-forget home box it takes the fiddly parts off your plate. either way the boards above will serve you well.