These are the two boards people actually shortlist for local AI at the edge. They are not close competitors - they solve different problems. Here is the decision in one page.
LLM inference at this scale is almost entirely memory-bandwidth-bound. The Orin Nano moves about 102 GB/s; the Pi 5 manages roughly 17 GB/s. For generation speed on the same quantized model, that gap matters more than every other spec on the sheet combined. Expect the Orin Nano to produce tokens several times faster on 3B-8B models, and to run 7B-8B Q4 models that simply do not fit comfortably on a Pi.
Chatbots on small models, home automation, learning: Pi 5. Serious local assistants, 7B+ models, vision pipelines: Orin Nano. Buying the wrong one costs you either $150 of overspend or a board that cannot run your model.
Our Edge AI Readiness Kit (€7.83) covers setup paths for both boards plus the other common SBCs, and the Model Compatibility Audit (€4) checks which models your specific board and RAM will actually run before you download anything.