When comparing Banana Pi vs Novasom Industries M7, the Slant community recommends Banana Pi for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers?” Banana Pi is ranked 48th while Novasom Industries M7 is ranked 62nd. The most important reason people chose Banana Pi is:
Banana Pi officially supports Fedora, Arch, Lubuntu and openSUSE. It also can be used with Raspbian (Debian derivative) or Android.
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 Additional keys for booting or shutting down
Pro SATA port
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 Onboard Wi-Fi
Most models have an onboard Wi-Fi.
Pro Industrial alternative of Pi3
Novasom Industries designed RASPMOOD that helps you to reaplce Pi3 immediately. It's a real plug and play.
You can see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwn2kviXJZ0&feature=youtu.be
Pro This is a real industrial grade product
The users can get a lot more in terms of performance and moreover in industrial safety of the product (wide range protected power, don't eat µSD, available on logistic programmed production flow, technical assistance team always available and so on), without destroying them started project thanks to a compatible HW in form fit and functions.
Pro Access to the design team to discuss the options when the real solution requires additional functionality
This allows us to arrive at the optimum solution to our problems.
Pro OS works in RAM memory
It's stable and faster than on the MicroSD , and avoid the burn problem of the classic armbian installation.
Pro Low cost modification/customization are available.
Jusk ask!
Cons
Con Bad software support
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 Does not fit most Raspberry Pi cases, even though it's where it clearly has gotten the inspiration from
The Banana Pi is pretty noticeable a Rapberry Pi lookalike and the name does not hide this information either. Unfortunately it's a bit larger than the Raspberry Pi, making it very hard to fit into most Raspberry Pi cases.