ESP32 display boards compared
Every popular ESP32 board with a screen, side by side: the Cheap Yellow Display and its capacitive Guition successors, the Sunton / Waveshare / Elecrow panel boards, AMOLED and e-paper options, and the new ESP32-P4 MIPI-DSI generation. Click a column to sort; use the filters to answer "which board for my project?".
Specs and prices are community/vendor-sourced (checked July 2026), not datasheet-verified — clone boards vary batch to batch, so confirm against the linked resources before ordering. The ESPHome column links a known-good config where one exists.
21 of 21 boards
How to choose, by project
- Home Assistant wall switch (fits a wall box): Guition 4848S040 — square 4" 480x480, relay SKUs.
- Wall dashboard, 7": Waveshare Touch-LCD-7 (best supported) or the Sunton 8048S070 (cheapest); watch the ESP32-P4 boards if you want 1024x600 and can live on the software frontier.
- Desk widget / first display board: the classic CYD if budget rules, otherwise the Guition JC3248W535 — capacitive touch, IPS and an S3 for a few dollars more.
- Rotary knob / dial: M5Stack Dial.
- Always-on low-power dashboard: LilyGo T5 4.7" e-paper.
- Wearable / smartwatch build: Waveshare AMOLED 1.8".
- Pocket ticker / gauge: T-Display-S3 (IPS) or its AMOLED sibling.
Why the display interface matters
The single biggest technical divide between these boards is how the screen is wired to the chip. SPI (the CYD class) is simple and leaves pins free but tops out around 320x240 before UIs feel laggy. QSPI (JC3248W535, AMOLED boards) is ~4x faster and still pin-frugal. Parallel RGB (most 4.3–7" S3 boards) drives 800x480 smoothly but needs PSRAM for the framebuffer and consumes nearly every GPIO — which is why those boards have so few free pins and occasionally flicker when Wi-Fi and flash writes compete. MIPI-DSI (the ESP32-P4 generation) finally does 720p+ without those trade-offs, but the software support is still maturing. The interface column above tells you which world each board lives in — full explainer here.
Guides
- Which display board for Home Assistant? — picks by destination: wall switch, dashboard, knob, e-paper, voice.
- 7-inch ESP32 displays compared — Sunton vs Waveshare vs Elecrow vs the ESP32-P4 wave.
- The CYD family guide — model codes decoded, revision gotchas, and which one to buy.
- SPI vs QSPI vs RGB vs MIPI-DSI — why big cheap screens feel slow, and what each interface costs you.
- E-paper vs LCD for always-on dashboards — refresh, battery and readability traded honestly, plus the e-paper boards worth buying.