I recently bought 2 of these and they are EXCELLENT! I can leave them running 24/7 without worrying about how much electricity they're using. The performance, flexibility and reliability far exceeds the Raspberry Pis that are confined the to cupboard and they're probably a fair bit faster than my old desktop PCs that I rarely switch on any more.
I've gone uber-minimalist and only have NVME drives attached via USB-3. One's connected via ethernet, the other has a wifi connection. Personally I don't need any more and I've retired my old servers for now.
In which ways? Most commenters say the exact opposite, that cheap N100 mini PCs are less reliable than Raspberry Pis.
I'm just now trying to decide which way to go. Raspberry Pi 5 is definitely much much more interesting from the nerdy point of view, but would cost about the same as some cheap N100, for half the power. Though half the electricity usage too.
If you get away with a 1/2 GB RAM version I'd say the Pi 5 is worth it, otherwise cheap mini PCs are better. I've found mini PCs to be more reliable than the Pi's I've owned as well (including the 5), though a lot of that is mitigated if you go for an m.2 hat on the Pi. In general though, if you're thinking of using a Pi more like a regular computer there isn't really anything special about it that makes it worthwhile. Well, beyond "I get to tinker more" if you particularly like assembling the thing, picking out the exact case, finding your favorite m.2 hat, etc. Even if you enjoy doing all that by the time you're done you still end with a PC that is worse than one you could just buy but maybe with a claim of saying you saved $20 doing so.
Where I like the Pi is use cases that don't quite fit with a normal mini PC like IP KVM.
My use case is Home Assistant, Pi-hole and such things. I would go for the 8 GB model and the NVMe hat, ending up somewhere around 170-180€. So practically the same price as N100.
With RPi I do like the tinkering aspect, an actual community, and lower power consumption -- I'd prefer passive cooling but I can't see a way to do that with the NVMe hat.
With N100 I would get double CPU power, RAM and storage. But I don't actually need that extra power, and the concept of buying a cheap pre-built PC is just a lot less appealing than something more nerdy. So I'll probably end up getting the RPi just for the, err, shall we call emotional reasons.
