When comparing Banana Pi M3 vs ESPRESSObin, the Slant community recommends ESPRESSObin for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers for building a NAS system?” ESPRESSObin is ranked 3rd while Banana Pi M3 is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose ESPRESSObin is:
It has three Gb ethernet ports.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Official support for multiple Desktop-version Linux distros
Banana Pi officially supports Fedora, Arch, Lubuntu and openSUSE. It also can be used with Raspbian (Debian derivative) or Android.
Pro Excellent compatibility with Raspberry Pi software
Other than having a port of Raspbian (the official OS for Raspberry Pi) available for use with full capabilities, Banana Pi can also use many applications that were originally written for Raspberry. One of these is WiringPi, a C/C++ library which gives easy access to Raspberry's I/O with a strong Arduino flavor. But that is just one example of the many open source projects being ported to Banana Pi.
Pro 3x Gigabit LAN
It has three Gb ethernet ports.
Pro Das U-Boot bootloader
It uses the opensource boot loader "Das U-Boot".
Pro Fast SATA III port
Pro Mini-PCI-E slot
Few SOC boards have this feature--and there are a couple Mini-PCIE RAID cards on the market that might work nicely
Cons
Con No off-the-shelf camera modules
The A20 chip that the Banana Pi uses lacks a true Camera Serial Interface implementation, instead it uses a parallel camera interface. The problem with this is that there are no off-the-shelf camera modules that support this and can connect to the Banana Pi, but it should be mentioned that the makers of Banana Pi have promised to create a camera module that is supported by it.
Con Expensive
It costs $129.99.
Con Only one SATA port
It has only one SATA port.