Every year like clockwork, new breeds of single-board computers (SBCs) and the latest revisions of our favorite boards hit the market with makers, engineers, and IT professionals alike scrambling to get their hands on them to build projects around the new feature sets they bring.

As with any new development technology, this sparks healthy debates among users as to which boards are the best and why some others were not included. This ultimately boils down to “sorting logic,” meaning that they can be sorted in many ways — price points, performance, form factors, user communities, and so forth.

Applications also factor into this equation, as task-based SPCs are wide-ranging and handle everything from industrial automation to UAV controllers. As a result, this top 10 roundup focuses on mainstream SBCs that hobbyists, makers, and engineers can use for any number of projects whether they’re newcomers to the community or 30-year IT veterans. With that said, here are the top 10 mainstream single-board computers currently on the market, or will be for the fall of 2018.