The question of which is the right developer board for a beginner is not so easy to answer. There is a lot to consider and in the end it also depends on what you want to do with the board. A simpler CPLD developer board may also be sufficient for your requirements.
If you only want to make a few LEDs flash or if you already have experience with electrical engineering and want to generate a signal, then inexpensive boards with few components are suitable for your first steps with FPGAs. The left board is equipped with SD-RAM and the right board is equipped with DDR3-RAM. The price of both boards is less then 20$. The RAM of the left board is slower but a little bit easier to access. The RAM of the right board is faster but a little bit more complicated to access.
If you have little or no previous knowledge and would like to experiment only without a specific goal, then developer boards with many components are suitable for your first steps with FPGAs.
If you are generally interested in the topic and would like to start one or more projects with the collected knowledge, there are at least two options.
The first (and more expensive) is to buy a developer board with many components for the first steps and then to buy one or more additional boards for special tasks. The second (and less expensive) is to buy a board with enough components for the start and as many connection options for expansion modules as possible.
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I personally prefer boards with a VGA or HDMI output. This allows me to display more complex information. If you still have a monitor or TV with VGA input and a simple VGA resolution is enough for you, then I recommend the cheaper Cyclone IV board with VGA output to start with. It costs less than 30$ and can be expanded with additional modules. If you don’t have a monitor or TV with VGA input or if you’d rather use a higher image resolution, I recommend the Cyclone 10 board. It has similar features and specifications to the Cyclone IV board but supports HDMI and higher resolutions. It costs less than 50$ and can also be expanded with additional modules. But that is just my personal opinion.
If you are willing to spend a little more money, I recommend a board with HDMI, network, USB and a SD card slot. These boards typically costs 100$ or more.
This board costs a little less than 100$ and offers an HDMI output, a gigabit network port, USB 2.0, an SD card slot and 34 IO ports. The FPGA is one of the smallest, but you get a good daughterboard with many connection options for the money. With this equipment you can try out and learn a lot. And if the FPGA is not powerful enough for you and if you are willing to pay 160$, then you can get this board with a much larger and much more powerful FPGA.
If you are just interested in learning how to access different types of RAM and flash, then the following board is the right one for you. It costs about 75$ and has SRAM, SDRAM, parallel FLASH and serial FLASH.
