The Orange Pi 5 Plus on its own should be much cheaper than an N100 system. Only when you add in those extras does the price even out. I bought mine in an overpriced bundle for 182€ a few months ago.

It supports NVMe SSDs same as an N100.

Maintenance is exactly the same; they both run mainline Linux.

Where the N100 perhaps wins is in performance.

Where the Orange Pi 5 Plus (and other RK3588-based boards) wins is in power usage, especially for always-on, low-utilization applications.