When comparing Banana Pi vs SanCloud BeagleBone Enhanced WiFi 1G, 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 SanCloud BeagleBone Enhanced WiFi 1G is ranked 59th. 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
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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 Pin to Pin Compatible with the BeagleBone Black
Pro Onboard Storage
4GB 8-bit eMMC onboard flash storage for main firmware image and also a micro-SD for programming and extra storage
Pro Excellent Support
Super support from SanCloud and the wider BeagleBoard community
Pro Connect up to 20 devices.
Connect 10 devices out of the box. Up to 20 devices can be connected by a simple OTG port and config modification.
Pro Plenty of I/Os and more speed & power than the BeagleBone Black.
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.