NiceHash vs Hiveos – Which Is Better?

The Cryptocurrency growth rate is expanding as countries worldwide continue to show interest in Bitcoin. Experts say Bitcoin is a revolution that will shape the future of money.

And as the world keeps buying into this digital currency’s growing influence, individuals and brands alike cannot ignore the rising tide of crypto.

NiceHash and Hiveos are the most recommended Linux-based operating systems for mining cryptocurrency.

Crypto mining is a method through which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are generated and transactions verified. It also prevents double-spending on the digital currency on a distributed network.

Understanding the unique features that set NiceHash and Hiveos apart can help you make better decisions that match your crypto needs.

NiceHash is still in its beta stage but is solid and good enough for people who are new to crypto mining. Hiveos, on the other hand, is more advanced and comes with configuration freedom.

If you are not yet decided on what to use, this review will guide you into making the right decision based on your needs. So let’s get straight to it.

NiceHash vs Hiveos – What Are They?

NiceHash

NiceHash is more of a marketplace for buying and selling hashing power. The NiceHash platform allows you to sell your computing power and buy crypto mining power following a specific algorithm for profit.

NiceHash was launched in 2014 when the market experienced a significant spike in crypto mining, making it complex and complicated to start coin mining. NiceHash came in and lowered the barrier to entry and removed the worries of deciding which coin to mine.

Everything happens in real-time when using NiceHash. The good thing with the platform is that you don’t have to commit specific times when trading your computing power.

As an incentive, NiceHash auto switches to the most profitable algorithms at regular intervals to maximize your revenue.

NiceHash marketplaces use Bitcoin and Ethereum. Therefore, regardless of your chosen algorithm, your pay comes out in crypto. The application is easy to download, and while it might not be the best choice for expert crypto miners, it’s still a top choice for many.

Hiveos

Hiveos is an operating system whose main objective is to provide crypto miners with a convenient interface. The ultimate mining platform allows you to set up, mine, and control the whole process effectively and hassle-free from a central place.

The platform is free to users and supports mining on GPU rigs, ASICS, and CPUs. While Hiveos has its pool, it also helps many other tools that allow you to mine ETC and ETH. However, statistics show that 80% of miners prefer using Hiveos to mine ETH.

Hiveos has apps for Android and iOS. The apps are easy to install and set up, and the moment you install the software, your farm infrastructure automatically detects your mining rigs and adds them to the management dashboard.

The Hiveos app can monitor and manage your mining rigs remotely.

NiceHash vs Hiveos – Features

NiceHash Features

Diverse Coin Pool

NiceHash allows you to mine a range of coins like Bitcoin and popular altcoins like Ethereum. NiceHash has a practical multi-switching algorithm that picks the most lucrative coins to mine at any given time, optimizing the mining efficiency.

Also Read: Best Browsers For CryptoCurrency

Central Dashboard

NiceHash features an uncluttered dashboard that serves as a home for your mining and trading operations. The dashboard shows your current activities, devices, and a comprehensive, balanced view. In a nutshell, the dashboard gives you an overview of the system’s performance.

Use Your Computer 

This feature helps you mine coins without necessarily using specific mining hardware as it uses the CPU/GPU power likely to be available on your machine. The site also has a profitability calculator to determine the amount of mining you can do and help you plan accordingly.

Hash Power Buying

The system gives you the power to expand your crypto mining scope by letting you purchase additional hash power without having to upgrade your hardware.

The hash power buying feature acts as rented hash power, allowing you to harness other resources to help you mine without investing in expensive dedicated devices.

Cryptocurrency Exchange Software

Aside from its crypto-mining capabilities, NiceHash also acts as a comprehensive cryptocurrency exchange platform by supporting a wide range of emerging and established crypto coins, allowing you to make the best out of the operations by trading without third-party exchanges.

Hiveos Features

Setup

Under the setup feature, we have GPU, AIC, worker’s bulk installation, Deploy PXE, and Diskless PXE. You can easily install these setups on the most rig configurations within minutes. The setup also allows you to install Hiveos in bulk on your rigs using its Drive Flashing utility.

Deploying PXE will enable you to deploy hundreds or even thousands of rigs, giving you complete control over the process. Hiveos diskless PXE reduces the cost of your mining investment by saving on disk media.

Manage

The manage feature allows you to monitor data in real-time with a regular refresh interval without reloading the page.

The Heat map feature under manage lets you know when temperatures are critical, while the Telegram tab keeps you updated on your farm’s performance.

Under Manage, the platform organizes workers into farms, shares efficiency, statistics, remote console, VPN, power consumption, and schedules to manage workers, create events to launch flight sheets, or execute any other commands.

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Flight Sheets

Flight Sheets let you tweak the worker settings with combinations of wallets, pools, and miners. To add wallets is as simple as selecting a coin and entering an address, while fast switching allows you to switch between pools and servers.

Smart Notifications 

The Smart Notification feature on Hiveos ensures that you don’t miss anything. If anything happens, you immediately get a notification by this feature so that you can promptly take action to prevent issues.

Schedules

This feature helps you automate specific processes. For instance, you can set your workers to switch from overclocking to downvolting with or without your participation. The schedule feature allows this process to happen continuously.

NiceHash vs Hiveos – Getting Started

NiceHash

Start by downloading the NiceHash Miner. When downloading, you will be redirected to the GitHub page to download the miner installer or the zip version. The zip version does not require installation; you can run it from the download folder.

  • Login to www.nicehash.com
  • Navigate the mining tab
  • Click Download Miner or add the Asic button
  • Select NiceHash Miner and Download
  • Click on Download NiceHash Miner

Also Read: Best Coinbase Alternatives

Starting the Zip Version

Once you download the NiceHash Zip version, extract the files on your machine’s desired folder. Once the extraction is complete, find NiceHashMiner.exe and double-click on it. NiceHash Miner will start automatically.

Installing NiceHash Miner

To install NiceHash Miner, double click on your downloaded nhm_windows_ {version}.exe. 

From here, follow the steps directed by the installer, after which the installer creates a shortcut on your desktop. NiceHash will start automatically once the installation is complete.

Hiveos

Hiveos is an all-in-one tool that helps you monitor and manage all your mining rigs in a single dashboard. Before installing Hiveos on your rig, start by creating an account or logging in to an existing account.

Make sure you create a secure password, and I recommend setting up two-factor authentication for additional security of your account.

Adding workers

Once you set up an account, connect rigs to the Hiveos dashboard. GPU and ASICs rigs are uniformly called workers, and you can connect them to your dashboard via Farm Hash or Manual setup.

Farm Hash does not require you to pre-create a rig on the dashboard while connecting and can be effectively used together with Hive Flasher for installing rigs in bulk.

Anyone who has used Hiveos is familiar with connecting workers to the dashboard through Manual setup. The manual setup uses a rig ID and a password to configure each miner.

The process is more tedious than Farm Hash, though it is still used by old-school users who find it convenient.

To add a worker, click on the plus sign at the top right corner of your dashboard and choose worker. Add new worker will pop up with the following steps:

  • Choose between GPU and ASIC types
  • Name your rig. Give it any name or leave it blank
  • Input your password
  • Add custom tags to help you separate projects by filters for various workers and farms
  • Describe your rigs for your convenience
  • Once the above procedures are complete, click the Add button

Downloading the Image

Visit the download page to get the latest Hiveos version. Download the image from the Hiveos website as a zip file or torrent. You also have an option to download Hiveos for ASICs or through the bulk installation tool.

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GPU installation

Writing Disk Image

Though most users prefer using USB drives, you must write Hiveos in the image onto an SSD. First, extract the image from the .zip file, then write the .img file to your drive.

If you use Windows, you can use the Win32 Disk, HDD Raw Copy Tool, or Rufus. For macOS and Linux, use Etcher.

Once the above procedure is complete, you will notice a newly created drive in your system where you can pre-configure your worker using Farm Hash or ID and password (Manual Setup).

ASIC Installation

Before starting the installation process, ensure your ASIC miner is supported. During installation, connect to your worker remotely using SSH. You’re good to go once your worker successfully connects to the dashboard.

NiceHash vs Hiveos – Pricing

NiceHash

The NiceHash platform is available for free installation and has a flexible fee structure depending on the coins you’ll be mining and trading.

NiceHash charges a fee for all services provided to users. The amount charged varies depending on the type of operation.

NiceHash charges 0.0001 BTC against spam for creating a new purchase order. In addition, 3% of the amount spent on each order applies. However, this does not apply to the amount yet to be spent due to canceled applications.

Buying the hash power: Fees

SERVICE FEE
A non-refundable new order fee 0.0001 BTC
Amount spent on orders for buying hash power 3%

Service fees for selling hash power

This applies to NiceHash miners, the stratum servers, and NHOS.

PAYMENT FEE
Payouts to the wallet (minimum bal. 1000 satoshi = 0.00001000 BTC) 2%

N/B: payout happens every four hours

When withdrawing to external wallets, NiceHash commissions are as follows:

For balances less than 0.1 BTC – 5%

For credits more than 0.1 BTC – 3%

NiceHash features a well-structured and straightforward fee structure with maker and taker fees. NiceHash calculates Trade levels based on your lifetime activity, and once you reach a certain level, you will never go to a higher fee again.

Click here for more details on the fees.

Hiveos

Hiveos platform comes in three plans: Free plan limited to four workers and with limited features, $3 per month per rig or $2 per month per ASIC.

Their custom plan features all regular features plus more, over 1000 rigs and more, individual billing and support, private proxy channels for more reliable access, and is suitable for business.

Hiveos is considered the most profitable pool and guarantees to give you high-profit payouts using their PPS+ distribution mode.

Ethereum

Cryptocurrency Daily Earnings per 100 MH/s
Ethereum $1.61 = 0.00132 ETH
Ethereum Classic $1.23 = 0.07914 ETC

N/B: payouts happen daily at 10.33 AM GMT+3 with a minimum payout of 0.2ETH at a transaction pool fee of 0%

NiceHash vs Hiveos – Similarities and Differences

Differences

NiceHash is still in its beta stage. It has the power to decide what you should mine depending on the profitability of your specific hardware, saving you the hassle of monitoring the crypto market to determine what to mine and maximize your revenue.

Hiveos is more advanced than NiceHash and gives you freedom regarding configuration. It is slightly stable and more reliable than NiceHash, and with Hiveos, you can do so much from the excellent web interface.

While it might be challenging to make changes to your rigs in the future with NiceHash, Hiveos lets you do everything from their interface.

Hiveos is attractive with an impressive knowledge base and remote monitoring features, while NiceHash takes the exchange of hash power to remarkable levels.

Another difference between NiceHash and Hiveos is that NiceHash is free to use while Hiveos requires fixed payment before you can have unrestricted access to support and all features.

Hiveos has incorporated a smart and improved notification system compatible with platforms such as Telegram and Discord. NiceHash’s notification capability, on the other hand, is underwhelming.

Hiveos allows you to mine any coin on any pool, including NiceHash, while NiceHash is limited to its algorithm and Bitcoin payouts.

Hiveos’ business models are based on price per worker or the pool’s fee when you choose to pay via the pool. NiceHash’s business model, on the contrary, is based on the fees taken from buyers and sellers of the hashing power and fees on their exchange.

Similarities

The main differences between these two are in the features, the price they charge, and each software support. However, they are both Linux-supported platforms that you can use to mine cryptocurrency.

All these software platforms are compatible with GPU and ASIC rigs. As a result, if you have both ASIC and GPU, you should not be worried about running two software systems when you opt for any of these two.

Both Hiveos and NiceHash have a web-based hardware management interface, which means you can monitor everything remotely. All you have to do is login into your account and access real-time updates on the statuses of your mining rigs from any location.

NiceHash and Hiveos have overclocking and custom settings. You can choose to overclock your mining equipment when you notice a decrease in revenue due to increased competition.

Overclocking and custom settings also ensure the effects of overclocking on the performance of your rigs.

NiceHash vs Hiveos – Pros and Cons

NiceHash

Pros

  • NiceHash is one of the easiest ways to start earning from mining cryptocurrency. The platform saves you the time of having to research mining pools or software, as it does everything using a graphical application.
  • You don’t need cryptocurrency knowledge to start mining on NiceHash.
  • It can be trusted since it has been operating for over six years. It is entirely anonymous, risk-free, and is typically reassuring that the crypto space is not a scam.
  • Thanks to its low payout threshold, you can quickly achieve payout thresholds within hours. Thresholds for other mining pools are a bit high and may take you days to achieve.

  • NiceHash uses internal accounting that enables the transfer of small amounts of crypto currency.
  • NiceHash sends payments directly to your internal wallet. Meaning that you can withdraw or trade earnings as you wish. If transaction fees are too high for you, wait for better transaction rates.
  • NiceHash updates its product features automatically. All you need to do is set it and leave it running till you stop it. NiceHash also allows you to freely switch algorithms for a more paying one for maximum profitability.

Cons

  • NiceHash is a third-party platform in itself which is a big concern for some miners. Third-party arrangements decide how much you earn depending on how much profit they will make.
  • NiceHash is not profitable to the seller because you still need to cater to pool fees.
  • NiceHash cannot be considered a long-term investment. It only works best for short-term crypto purchases that have massive hash power.
  • It is real-time, meaning prices keep fluctuating. Therefore, if at all the crypto market will boom in the future, you will only take advantage of buying the hash power at a lower rate.

Hiveos

Pros

  • The ability to manage rigs remotely gives it a huge plus.
  • The platform is constantly updating and adding more features as guided by mining community needs.
  • Hiveos guarantees you hassle-free mining, a predictable revenue stream, and maximum performance and speed.
  • The platform allows you to manage processes across GPU and ASICS whether you have one or thousands of devices.

  • Hiveos is the best solution for ETH and ETC mining. It allows you to receive predictable high income with their PPS+ payout model.
  • Hiveos enables you to improve your hash rate using manual and automatic settings, reach the highest virus protection level, and enjoy multiple Hiveos features to manage all the farms easily.

Cons

  • You have to monitor and configure what the rig is doing to maximize your profits. You must manually monitor coins and keep switching to the best-performing coin as the market fluctuates to maintain profitability.
  • Hiveos requires you to set up a separate wallet for every coin you mine. It is also your responsibility to convert alternative coins (altcoins) into AUD or BTC.
  • Hiveos is only free for the first rig. The platform is not free from the second rig and beyond unless you mine to the Hiveos pool.

Conclusion – Hiveos vs NiceHash

Hiveos takes the crown for the best crypto mining operating system. Hiveos is feature-rich and gives better mining as it allows you to configure the system and cards.

But if you feel like you need to maximize the advantageous ability of NiceHash to pay you in Bitcoin regardless of the coin you are mining, the great news is that you can use Hiveos to mine to a NiceHash pool.

The only disadvantage would be that NiceHash cannot automatically switch algorithms based on profitability. So, you need to specify directly that you’ll use the NiceHash pool when choosing the algorithm.

About Author

Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing. I started my first e-commerce company in college, designing and selling t-shirts for my campus bar crawl using print-on-demand. Having successfully established multiple 6 & 7-figure e-commerce businesses (in women’s fashion and hiking gear), I think I can share a tip or 2 to help you succeed.