Every IP KVM tested: PiKVM still wins, JetKVM closes the gap

What happened

Jeff Geerling published a head-to-head review of essentially every IP KVM currently shipping to homelab operators — PiKVM v4 Plus, JetKVM, NanoKVM (Sipeed), GL.iNet Comet, BliKVM, and a handful of generic Chinese clones. The post hit 259 on Hacker News within hours, which for a hardware review is the equivalent of a stadium crowd. The comment thread is the usual mix of homelab obsessives, sysadmins who remember paying $1,800 for a Raritan Dominion, and a surprising number of people quietly admitting they still drive to the office to reboot a wedged hypervisor.

Geerling's headline finding: PiKVM v4 Plus is still the device to beat, but JetKVM at $69 has compressed the price-to-capability curve so hard that the only honest recommendation for most homelabbers is "buy the JetKVM and stop overthinking it." The PiKVM wins on feature breadth — proper ATX control board, OLED status display, hardware-level HID emulation, mature web UI, and a community that has been hammering on the firmware since 2020. The JetKVM wins on the only metric that matters at 2am when your Proxmox host won't POST: it works, it's cheap enough to put one behind every machine, and the capture latency is under 60ms.

The NanoKVM gets a qualified recommendation with an asterisk the size of a billboard: the original v1 shipped with a telnet backdoor and hardcoded credentials, and while Sipeed patched it, the incident is a useful reminder that an IP KVM is, by design, the most privileged device on your network.

Why it matters

For twenty years, out-of-band management was a moat. Dell iDRAC Enterprise, HPE iLO Advanced, Supermicro IPMI with the KVM license — these were the licenses you paid for so you didn't have to drive to a colo. Consumer motherboards shipped without any of it, which is why every homelabber eventually ended up with a Raspberry Pi taped to a USB capture card and a janky Python script.

The shift Geerling documents is that the BMC functionality stack — video capture, HID injection, virtual media mount, power control — has been fully commoditized into $69 of hardware running open firmware. That's not a small thing. It means the architectural assumption baked into enterprise server pricing (that remote KVM is worth a $400 license per box) is now wrong. It also means the homelab/edge/SMB segment finally has parity with rack-mount gear for the one feature that actually justified buying rack-mount gear.

The community reaction on HN broke along predictable lines. The PiKVM loyalists pointed out — correctly — that the JetKVM's ATX control story is weaker, that the web UI is less polished, and that there's no equivalent to PiKVM's mature MSD (mass storage device) emulation for booting ISOs. The JetKVM camp countered that for 90% of homelab use (get me a console, let me type at the BIOS, let me power-cycle a hung box), the JetKVM is sufficient and the $400 saved buys a lot of other gear. Both are right. The interesting structural point is that we now have a market segmented by firmware maturity rather than by hardware capability, which is exactly the shape every commoditizing hardware category eventually takes.

A quieter thread in the comments is worth surfacing: several operators noted they'd standardized on JetKVM specifically because it's cheap enough to be disposable. If the firmware gets weird or the vendor disappears, you throw the $69 box away. That's a different mental model from the PiKVM "this is infrastructure I will maintain for a decade" framing, and it tracks how a lot of modern homelab decisions get made — optimize for replaceability, not longevity.

What this means for your stack

If you're running anything more than one machine without out-of-band access, the calculus has changed. At $69 per node, putting an IP KVM behind every box is now cheaper than the cumulative annoyance of any single "I have to physically touch that server" incident. The break-even is roughly one in-person reboot per machine per year, and most homelab operators clear that bar in a month.

Concrete recommendations from the review map cleanly onto use cases. For a primary hypervisor or anything you'd describe as "production-ish," the PiKVM v4 Plus is still the right buy — the ATX board, the OLED, and the firmware track record justify the price delta. For everything else (lab boxes, secondary nodes, the NUC running Home Assistant, the mini-PC doing Plex), JetKVM is the answer. Skip the NanoKVM unless you've personally verified the firmware version and are comfortable auditing it; the vendor's response to the original telnet issue was fine but unhurried.

The security posture is the part most people will get wrong. An IP KVM sees your BIOS, mounts virtual media, and types at your keyboard — it is, functionally, a remote root shell with extra steps. Put it on a management VLAN, gate it behind a VPN or Tailscale, never expose the web UI to the internet, and assume any vendor firmware update could ship a backdoor (intentional or otherwise). The right threat model for an IP KVM is "network-attached HID with kernel-level access," not "convenient web console."

Looking ahead

The next eighteen months will sort the IP KVM market the same way every commoditizing hardware category gets sorted: on firmware. Hardware specs are converging fast — RISC-V SoCs with HDMI capture and USB gadget mode are now cheap, and at least three new entrants are reportedly shipping in late 2026. The winners will be the vendors who treat firmware as a product (regular updates, clear security disclosures, real CVE responses) rather than as a one-time integration cost. PiKVM has a multi-year head start on that culture. JetKVM is building it. Everyone else is on the clock.