Hello everybody,
Is it worth buying a clone of the Arduino board only because it‘s cheaper? Will it last as long as the original?
Thank you in advance for your answers 
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Welcome to the forum
Clone boards work well in my experience and have lasted well in my home environment. However, I have made a point of buying a genuine Uno and Nano as well to help support the Arduino project and to have a board that I can use as a reference should problems occur with my clone boards
Hello @darina617,
What board are you looking at getting? I currently have used/still own over 12 boards, and only one is a genuine Arduino boards. I would say there are both advantages and disadvantages to using a clone board vs a genuine board.
It would be interesting to hear
Most cloned Nano have old bootloader.
They don't all use the same USB socket, UNOs that I have bought have B or MiniB.
Different USB chip.
Different levels of quality.
Tom... 
If you want to experiment with the 16U2 chip, you need the genuine Uno.
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I only have 1 original and it's with a serial connection, not USB. All others are clones. To support the developers I made a donation.
With original Arduino boards you get a nice box a little booklet, stickers and a lot of good karma
Yeah, I don't really like their boards, but I also donated to the IDE. Some of the newer ones are kind of cool, but they aren't economical to purchase where I live.
Or accidentally buy a counterfeit...
But please make sure you aren't buying a counterfeit board.
Or a Lonely Binary board.
You get that if you buy Lonely Binary boards as well. The lonely binary board is/was the best board I had (I actually liked it more than the genuine Arduino - purely from an aesthetic point of view, though it did have the 16u2 chip)
Nor where I live. I can get a clone for a quarter of the price!
This is my personal opinion, don't take it as absolute truth.
The main advantage of a clone is the cheap price. The other advantage is that if you get the right one, they can actually be "better" than the genuine ones. For example, I bought a clone that when being used in full power mode draws nearly 10 milliamps less than my genuine board. Most likely because it uses a CH340 chip instead of the 16u2.
The main disadvantage of a clone is that it doesn't have the same customer service attached to it. I've heard a few good things about the Arduino customer service, though I've never used it myself.
The other awful thing is that they take months to arrive - from China, with free postage is the lowest priority for the mail system (at least in oz). Also the quality is 
. I had a SMD Uno that worked beautifully for the first few weeks, and then suddenly started getting super hot - so hot the code froze. It would work for about 10 minutes and then freeze because it had overheated.
One difference I don't see mentioned is the FCC/ CE listing that all Original Arduino's carry. Cheap clones obviously are not listed.
This portends to quality as listed devices are required to use listed components whereas clones usually use counterfeit components.
This also matters if you manage to do any commercial applications. In my case I have had several commercial installations that required city/state inspections and a couple projects that were UL listed. In both situations it is a lot easier/cheaper if any high frequency devices used already carry FCC/ CE listing's
Of course this matters not for hobby use 
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Well, the male headers and dedicated serial and I2C headers with power and ground, and quartz crystal instead of ceramic resonator as a time base are definitely welcome. A lot of clones have those.
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