The core radio chip itself (the AD9363) appears to be identical and/or a binned version of the AD9364 chip used in things like USRP Radios (i.e. the high-end standard bearer brand for SDR) and can be configurated to behave like it [1]. The unit price for the AD9364 chip (in low volumes) is around $200. The ENTIRE PlutoSDR is $150 and that includes a Zynq-7010 FPGA (which itself is not cheap)!
Because it's built by Analog Devices, it's generally well supported. It's designed as an educational tool so there are a lot of tutorials for beginners like PySDR. I really like the interfacing libraries (pyadi) that allow me to easily configure the SDR from a python notebook and pull an RX buffer into numpy and process away.
[1] https://wiki.analog.com/university/tools/pluto/users/customi... [2] https://pysdr.org/index.html