That is a good point, especially buying ddr3 in 2019.
However, considering the 100e price difference, I can purchase 4tb storage for my other nas server 
Then the choice goes from “the best” to “good enough”
Here in Denmark:
The NUC J3455 is priced 146euro
The NUC J5005 is priced 186euro.
Thats 40euro in differences?
Both need RAM and Hardrive.
I wouldnt have any second thoughts about the choise between them. I would spend the 40euro extra and never look back. No matter if I need it or not 
Ofcouse, if you can spend the extra 40euro on something else, which will give you something better, then thats what you should do.
I run openHAB in NUC as well. What I can recommend is to run openHAB on Proxmox VE.
Proxmox VE is open-source server virtualization environment (debian distro + KVM hypervisor + nice web GUI). Basically everything can be done via GUI, so for new users it should be rather easy to use as well.
What is great in Proxmox, is that is also support scheduled snapshot (live) backups out of the box without need to shutdown the VM.
Even Proxmox is very lightweight and most probably run well also on cheapes NUC, I recommend to buy little bit better than just cheapest one.
My NUC7i3BNH is overkill for openHAB only, but I run some other VMs as well. My NUC support both M.2 and 2.5" drives and I have installed proxmox on M.2 SSD and all VMs to other.
There is a guide in this forum how to install Proxmox VE and openHAB
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I have never used any kinds of WM´s before… I just buy more computers and use it for single stuff. Expensive, yes, but it makes it abit more easier for me to comprehend
Virtualisation is a really nice and cheap technique to improve usage and workload of hardware.
Proxmox is free of charge if you don’t want support. 
if the system is growing, it’s possible to build a datacenter by using 3 or more real computers. A datacenter is able to run virtual machines (without real hardware) on every node, failover is built in
Indeed a big adventure park, but openHAB is just one fraction of services to run at such a datacenter…
I was actually planing to run single VM on it (as discussed deeper in my other post here Intel NUC vs Laptop for (single) VM running OpenHab and other automation related services)
That way I can easily backup entire system, because I am quite clumsy. Although I love Ansible deployment as Rich suggested on that other post. I use it on my workstation on virtual machines to test things out.
@Kim_Andersen not sure why in norway price difference is 80e between the two (ram is almost the same, few euros there as well). I will sleep on it
P.S. you should try Virtualisation if you never did, just spin some vagrant machine on your desktop and see how you like it, ability to take snapshots and rebuilt machine in 60s when testing is priceless for me (probably because I do not know what I am doing with linux, so most of the time I am just guessing)
Real benefit comes from easy backups. If you screw accidentally your openHAB env or after update you meet any problems, it takes couple of minutes and your environment is up and running again.
true one can use dockers to backup services, but you can use both, docker for per-service backup, and also vm for entire system backup (which I think is important for openhab and home automation in general, as it is quite complex system with a lot of thing happening)
Many (many!!) years ago I tried something… I think it was one of the first versions of WMware… I dumped it cause it was too difficult to get access to peperials, USB´s, drives etc…
But I like the idea to run several indepent systems on one hardware devices. I just hate struggling to get even simple things to work… (hmm, I probably never should have startet on openhab then .
I suspect it is much easier now. I run on ESXi and have had no problem mounting USB devices inside my VMs. That was the easiest part to work with in my setup.
Probably… I just havn´t had the patience to try again. Found it easier to just buy yet another computer 
Just as another datapoint, I have a NUC8i5BEK with 16gb RAM and 512GB Samsungs 970+ SSD running at ca. 3.3W in idle mode (headless). I know it’s overkill, but it does allow to test stuff faster and makes UIs with graphs (integrated or grafana) on tablets and mobiles more responsive.
Hi all i think this is related to subject , what ever platform you take…
I see the topic mostly becoming a hoky war 
, let me throw a piece in. I am running OrangePi Plus2e, chose it due to dimensions and RAM size (2gb). My Android experience tells me Java is always ready to eat more mem.
Emmc size turned out to be good enough for raspbian + openhabian install. Works fine. Though it’s a new install with uptume only about a week.
Takes a bit long t boot up, but does not feel sluggish in operation.
This looks quite interesting, except for the need to create an individual power supply:
What do you think?
I am running OpenHab on Allwinner H5 based Nanopi K1+ I have dozen of Z-wave devices and it seems an overkill.
OpenHab should run on any single board computer under Armbian, selection is quite big. Best thing there is - you don’t need to do anything. System is perfectly optimized for running from SD card: wear-out is cut down to minimum out of the box, system is secure, stable and supported, installation is menu driven.
Except the way oh does logging and persistence is usually orders of magnitude more than what even a typical non-optomised OS would do.
Also, not all boards are created equal. I have a BananaPi running Armbian and the list of things that don’t work like BT is quite long and if you try to do anything that requires a lot of of CPU such as, for instance, start OH, it over heats and freezes up.
I can’t therefore recommend just any old SBC. If you go outside the big players, do your homework.
Hi Igor very cool setup… but the only advantage i see when running on signal board PC is the power consumption(not a very big issue for me)
so i prefer a desktop PC… i have allot laying around office/home
as you can see OH is overkill for single board PC, so you can virtualize it very easy
and use the rest of the PC for other things… making OH as VM that can travel around very old hardware, is priceless for me … also i can perform backups and restores on the fly
what i want to say, we are each with our own unique issues /reality, its a good thing OH can run on all platforms
Bananapi (at least model Pro and M1+) comes with a chip that doesn’t have BT part at all. But I do agree at least BT is badly supported in general but other things, especially for server case operation, are supported very well. Regarding stability I won’t agree - Allwinner A20 is old, but (at least with Armbian modern kernel) it works perfectly stable for months/years. A20 is not prone to overheating (perhaps your experience goes to Banana with H3/H5 or A83T chip which is totally different hardware?) - you don’t even need a heat sink. But I do agree that application such as OH can be a bit too heavy for a 5-7 years old technology.
Edit: With H3 boards, there used to be problems with overheating and some boards with cheap voltage regulators overheats more then normally. And thermal throttling, which resulted in sudden emergency power off, was broken for some time.
True. Not everyone is powerful enough. This mostly goes for boards that are equipped with only 256/512Mb of memory … while anything with 4 core Allwinner H3 or better should be powerful enough.
I would certainly recommend to avoid exotics, equipped with weird chips, but everything that is labelled (Armbian supported) is just fine. At the same level than big players, whatever that might be? Skip things with little memory and go for boards that are equipped with eMMC. That is a huge step forward in terms of reliability/performance/durability.
When it comes to small boards its usually about testing boundaries/having fun, but since I have 150+ single board computers lying around my house, I just picked the one which accidentally had a wall mount case with it … and put OH on it. Next to this board is my main high-end dual Xeon server, which runs a dozen of VMs …
Containerization (Docker) is also supported on Armbian OOB and one can go that path if such layer is needed. I don’t use it since this is a dedicated machine for OH.
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Well you’re not an average user then, and this thread is foremost meant to provide help to those …
Rich’s key point is the second sentence but it’s not about HW power.
If you want to use non-mainstream HW and/or OS, be prepared to encounter (HW, OS) problems that you have to resolve for yourself simply because there’s not enough users here on the forum and elsewhere on the internet that could help you with that task.
So you also have to be capable of solving these on your own.
That’s fine if you are, but the above is why the recommendation for beginners and I’d say even intermediates is to go with the mainstream - which is RPi2/3 and openHABian.
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