For years, there has been a clear distinction between the Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards ... you can access one UART (pins D0 and D1 as RX and TX), one SPI (pins D10 to D13 as SS, MOSI, MISO ...

giving anyone with the Arduino IDE the ability to send data out over a GSM network. Of course, the Electron is just a GSM module tied to a microcontroller, and you can do the same thing with a Pi ...