Good decision. 64-bit hexacore processor and it supports Ubuntu 20.04 - still recommend you get an eMMC. Even though it does support booting from USB (SSD).
Edit: I agree with your philosophy. Five years ago when I got my first XU4, it was about twice the price of the RPi 2B+. Here we are five years later, and it still holds it own in benchmarks against the RPi 4 (except it isn't 64-bit).
another answer is set up a proxmox box being able to setup a new (virtual) server in minutes is pretty sweet.
mine is running node red grafana mqtt and influxdb currently
I had a plenty beefy box already and it still has lots of headroom so this is what I'm running on
Dell Precision T3600
Intel Xeon E5-1620 @3.60GHz
8GB RAM
RAID1 disks
NR installed natively, no Docker, on Arch Linux.
Why Arch? Because giving a little blood is OK with me 
Used to say the same thing about Gentoo of course I WANT to compile my OS 
working on it 
YAHP (Yet Another Hardware Post)
I must admit to being temped by this
The Chuwi LarkBox is a tiny computer that measures just 2.4″ x 2.4″ x 1.7″ but which is a full-fledged PC capable of running Windows 10 or other desktop operating systems.
Powered by a 10-watt Intel Celeron J4115 quad-core processor, the LarkBox has 6GB of RAM, 128GB of eMMC storage.
Wish it had built-in ethernet.
agreed I guess you could use a Ethernet to usb adapter but that adds to the cost and it only has 2 usb ports
I bought an N2 thanks to your recommendation and it is great! A little trickier to get set up and a bit more expensive. You may need some additional accessories if you want to change your distro etc. Definitely more powerful though. Don't know about the longevity/reliability but given the tech it seems like it will last.
Having said that - the PI4's I bought previously have actually been okay. I have just installed one at a client of mine's house (NR + HE combo) - and it's been running in test mode for quite a while. I do have a backup script called "rpi-clone" that periodically copies the disk image over to a low profile usb just in case.
Why do you give me reason to spend more money my wife won't like that 
Edit* although I can't see them readily available in the UK
You have to be careful - chatting with @aaiyar and others on these forums (gaahhh moca adapters) can get expensive.
RPI 4 works fine with an SSD HD, You still need the SD card to boot, but that is changing.
I have SSD on RPI 4 for daily backups as well as NR logging, works very well
Fanless i7 / SSD with lot of rs-232/rs-485 ports / dual lan running W7 (for various reasons):
hosting some music server, NR and various tools to manage my plc's and modbus devices. 12V DC powered (solar).
probably not the best machine but works as expected 365/24/7 without any failure.
I'm running node-red through home assistant on a NUC6.
I am running NR in a proxmox VM on an older Intel i7 NUC. Works great.
Have Mosquitto MQTT broker and Weewx on an RPi 3.
A client of mine is now running with a 4GB RPi 4 (sd card with usb backup).
Have an ODroid N2 (thanks @aaiyar!) ready for a new NR instance / experimentation possibly.
Docker and K8S on various different hardware (I have multiple docker swarms).
My main production instances are all Docker - K8S is just for testing.
I don't recommend K8S to anyone that doesn't explicitly NEED it, really, the tools aren't user friendly in the least and it is much more complex to both setup and maintain long term. It may be great for huge scale deployments at a large company with support staff, but it is awful to use in home environments.
Headless RPi 3b.
Works beautifully.
Download the Hubitat app
