Arduino's are cheap enough that I'd recommend picking one up (a clone works just like the official if you want to go even cheaper). But, the other boards are also pretty cool. I have a few Arduino projects and purchased a couple ESP boards to allow WiFi by moving the old projects over. The learning curve has been steep and I haven't made much progress on them, but doing simple tutorials is pretty fun anyway. Heck, there are plenty of Instructables for various projects that can get you a full DIY project based on instructions that actually do something beyond the simple blinking light tutorial.
