"When choosing a development board, consider what you get with it and what you want to use it for. FPGAs are ideal for use with high speed peripherals, and in general it is much easier to buy a board that contains the part you want, rather than trying to add one on later (and inevitably giving up and upgrading to a more capable board). Examples of things you might want, and are quite difficult to add yourself:

Gigabit Ethernet HDMI/DVI PCI/PCI Express External non-serial memory (DDR/Flash etc.) Things that are relatively easy to add, and are not so much of a big deal to wire up yourself.

MMC/SD cards Character (e.g. 16x2) LCDs Anything I2C/SPI and relatively low speed VGA (with low colour depth) I like having a board with many (at least 8) SPST switches and LEDs, and momentary buttons. Unlike a microcontroller where it's relatively easy to spit debug information out of a serial port or to an LCD with a single C function call, debugging FPGA designs is a bit harder. LEDs provide a zero fuss way to break out internal signals for visualisation - if you're tracking the progress of a complex state machine, you can light up an LED when it gets to a certain point without adding any extra logic. While these are easy enough to add yourself, I find that it's better to get a board that has them so that you don't waste valuable user IOs or waste time investigating failures caused by your terrible soldering skills."

Found here: https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards