There are users who will be happy with Roon Essentials and never need anything further. But there may be others who think they can dip their toe in the water with Essentials and then move to full Roon if they like what they see.
I can understand that technical considerations may preclude an upgrade path, but I don’t like the idea of people who didn’t know the limits at the outset being surprised to find that that they need new hardware and can’t keep their database if they want to move to full Roon.
In a perfect world the manufacturer/dealer selling Essentials powered gear would be at pains to ensure users were aware of the limits before taking their money. Unfortunately if that advice would see the user possibly preferring gear that the manufacturer/dealer doesn’t supply, then the world might be less than perfect. It would be great to see Roon making this plain to people on the Essentials website as well as helping product partners get it right.
The best arrangement, of course, would be for manufacturer/dealers selling Essentials gear to also have a full Roon hardware option available to sell. No more conflict, just alternative sales.
Roon Essentials now supports 30.000 tracks now instead of 15.000.
Roon Essentials supports the same Roon Ready Endpoints as the paid version of Roon.
Roon Essentials does not support Squeezeboxes.
Roon Essentials does not support DSD files.
No signal path is shown in Roon Essentials, but the sound quality remais exactly the same.
Conclusions:
If your music library consists of 30.000 tracks or less and you don’t need DSD and you don’t want to connect an old Squeezebox, Roon Essentials offers the same functionality and user experience as Roon.
For 1099 euro you can buy a beautifully sounding Elac music player (with analog/digital outputs and USB), that has a very responsive lifetime licensed Roon server built in.
Or, you could buy a Roon license for 500 euro, and let’s say an SMS200 for 450 euro, and a reasonable quality USB DAC for about 500 euro, and a NUC with SSD to run the Roon server on for about 300 euro.
In that case you spend at least 1750 euro for the same sound quality and het same software experience.
We may see more distinctions between Roon and Roon Essentials as the Roon feature set expands; just a guess.
I think it is vital for anyone contemplating a choice between Roon and Roon Essentials to understand that there is no upgrade path. If a user found at any time that they wanted more than Roon Essentials then they would find some inefficiencies in having acquired Roon Essentials first.
I speak as someone who recently installed a third kitchen sink tap, having opted for less expensive models initially.