I have been using Home Assistant and Hass.io on a RPi3 B+ for almost a year now and I am ready to upgrade my hardware. What would you recommend? What are the pros/cons of each option?
Thanks for you input
Best recommendation is to search the forums for this. TONS of threads regarding people’s opinions around this.
Personally, I upgraded from a RPi3 B+ to an Intel NUC i5-6260 about 6 months ago and haven’t looked back.
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Does it have a SSD drive? Thanks for your input
Yup, 128GB SSD and 8GB RAM. I found it on eBay for around $200. Others have said an i3 is fine (which I would agree with), but anyhow, it’s what I went with 
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If you already have a server to run it on, a VM is a no-brainer.
Otherwise, I’d go with the NUC option.
It depends on whether you want to use USB devices (such as a Conbee II stick or Aeotec Z-Stick) for connectivity. There are ways around it (such as using a raspbee, or vera hub) but passing through USB to a VM can be problematic.
I was using a VM for about a year, but once I wanted to add the z-wave and zigbee sticks I started running into trouble. I tried VirtualHere to pass the devices through (USB over IP) but there was some instability.
I ended up buying a cheap mini pc (HP Elitedesk 800), clean installing HASSIO on an ubuntu install.
Has been great, very stable and the z-wave and zigbee sticks work perfectly.
I use a HUSBZB-1 stick with mine, zero issues so far. ESXi’s USB passthrough might be better than some other hypervisors though.
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I use an Aeotec and a ConBee stick with Proxmox, also no issues with USB passthrough since more than 2 years.
I use a RPI4 since 5 months (4GB model) without any hassle.
Running these Addons:
- Configurator
- ESPHome
- Glances
- Mosquitto Broker
- Pi-Hole
- Portainer
- SSH & Web Terminal
- WireGuard
and developing some addons on this system.
Pretty beefy the RPI 4
The only flaw in my opinion is the SD card which can get corrupted, to deal with this case I regularly take snapshots and sync them to my NAS
Thanks for you input. In average, how much time does it take to restart? The SD card issue is one of the main reasons I haven’t switched to the RPi4, it happened to me once already with my current configuration. I had backups but still a hassle.
Wow !
Talk about throwing a handgrenade into a room full of extremists …
“Now Gathered Clerics of ALL the world’s Religions … What is the best Religion and Why ?” 
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Good point, but it has not been too bad.
I’m running USB Passthrough just fine using both the HUSBZB-1 and Aeotec Z-Wave stick on my Workstation 15 VM running on my Server 2012 R2 box. The only issue I have is that every so often after a reboot the /dev/ path will change from 0 to 1 or vice-versa. Only takes a quick comment and uncomment in my config and a restart and things are back to normal.
What @ab0tj said, if you have 24/7 hardware already there’s no point in spending any extra and so much faster than a Pi.
Disaster recovery is a two minute job if you back up the VM and easy to have multiple versions if you want to trial new things.
I run VMWare on my HTPC/server/anything else i can think of running with Windows 10 as the host OS and use a Zigbee stick with it with zero problems other than the initial release version of the VDMK helpfully didn’t have the USB passthrough enabled in HassOS, simple update of HassOS and been fine since, far more stable than the Pi3 I used previously.
If your offered the device named path too, eg /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Texas_Instruments_TI_CC2531_USB_CDC_etc, use that instead and you shouldn’t get that problem anymore.
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A little bit late to the conversation, but I also use an NUC.
It’s an i3 from 2013, 8GB RAM and 120GB SSD. It runs Ubuntu Server with Docker and it’s blazing fast!
Never had a problem.
I think NUCs from 2013 you can get for pretty cheap.
Another NUC user here. Went from RPi3+ -> VM -> NUC. I run HA within Docker as well.
I prefer the NUC for one big reason: you can now multi-task it, run other applications such as Pi-hole, etc, and you won’t have to worry about overtaxing it like an RPi. RPi’s are good for single purpose apps, but not so much in the multi-tasking aspects. Plus, I had so many SD corruption issues with my RPi3+ that I gave up.
Just look for tutorials on how to pass through usb devices or usb controllers for your platform. I run Unraid and found a YouTube video explaining in detail how to pass one of the 2 or 3 usb controller segments to my Hassio on Ubuntu Server VM.
You can install HassOS in a VM if you want to keep your environment the same as they are on your Pi.
Edit: I’d also say that a Raspberry Pi 4 should be a quality upgrade for you. Downsides: the Pi route comes with the risk of data loss when the SD card wears out, and as you add more devices you won’t have as much room to grow as you probably would on a VM.
I gave that a shot at first but never got it to work. I may give it a shot again, but for now if it ain’t broke…