Raspberry Pi or mini-PC: which one fits you?

Both are small, energy-efficient computers you use at home as a server. Yet they differ significantly. Here’s when a Raspberry Pi is the right choice and when you’re better off with a mini PC.

The differences

	Raspberry Pi 4 or 5	Mini PC (for example Intel N100)
Price	Low, but you buy power supply, case and storage separately	Often a complete device, also second-hand
Power consumption at idle	About 3 to 6 watts	About 6 to 12 watts
Speed	Enough for small services	Considerably faster, also for multiple virtual machines
Storage	SD card, or better a USB SSD (Pi 5 also NVMe with an additional board)	NVMe SSD and often room for a second disk
Processor type	ARM	x86 (Intel or AMD)
Software	Almost everything runs, but a few programs and Docker images are x86 only	Runs virtually everything
GPIO pins for electronics	Yes, 40 pins	No
Virtualization (Proxmox)	Limited and not official	Fully supported

Choose a Raspberry Pi if…

you have a small project, like Pi-hole, Home Assistant or a small web server;
you want to control electronics with the GPIO pins (see our GPIO pinout);
power consumption and size are important;
you enjoy learning and tinkering.

Choose a mini PC if…

you want to run multiple virtual machines with Proxmox;
you want a media server that transcodes video for TV and phone;
you use programs that only exist for x86;
you want the convenience of a regular computer with more memory and faster storage;
you want to expand later.

Why not both?

Many homelabs use both: a mini PC for the heavy lifting and a Raspberry Pi for something that needs to stay on all the time and consumes almost nothing, like Pi-hole. Calculate what it costs with our power cost calculator and check out which mini PC fits.