You built the server. You followed the $200 mini PC guide, got Ubuntu Server running, pulled your first Docker containers, and felt genuinely good about it. Then you went on Reddit.
Now your brain is full of Proxmox and Unraid and ZFS and RAIDZ and parity arrays and you’re convinced you installed the wrong thing.
You probably didn’t. But let’s find out for sure.
This post is the one I wish existed when I started poking around the homelab rabbit hole. Not another feature matrix. Not another “Proxmox wins for VMs, TrueNAS wins for NAS, Unraid wins for mixed drives” recap that leaves you exactly where you started. A plain-English answer based on what you actually want to do with the box.
Give me 20 minutes. You’ll know exactly what to run.
Wait, Should You Even Switch?
Before anything else: if Docker containers are all you’re running, you might not need to change anything.
Ubuntu Server plus Docker plus Portainer is a completely legitimate production-grade setup. It’s what a ton of self-hosters run. It’s what I described in the April post. The only reason to swap to one of the three platforms below is if you have a specific need that Ubuntu Server doesn’t meet well.
The short test: if you’re running Pi-hole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Vaultwarden, or some combination of Docker containers and nothing else, stay put. You don’t need Proxmox. You don’t need Unraid. Your current setup is not broken.
If you answered yes to any of these, read on:
- You want to run full virtual machines (Windows, a second Linux distro, a gaming VM)
- You have multiple hard drives and care deeply about data integrity and storage redundancy
- You want a point-and-click GUI that handles app installation without a terminal
- You’re building a dedicated NAS box, not a general-purpose server
Still reading? Good. Here’s how to pick.
The Four Personas: Which One Are You?
Forget the features for a second. Every Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid comparison on the internet starts with features. That’s why they’re all useless. Start with what you want to build.
Persona 1: “I just want to run Docker containers”
Answer: Ubuntu Server + Docker + Portainer. Stay there.
Seriously. Every platform below can run Docker. None of them runs Docker as cleanly, with as much documentation, as Ubuntu Server does. If you’re already there, you’re already home.
Persona 2: “I want to run full VMs, isolate services, experiment with different OSes”
Answer: Proxmox VE 9.2 (free)
This is what Proxmox was built for. Type-1 hypervisor, bare metal, no host OS sitting underneath. You get KVM-based virtual machines and LXC containers from a single web dashboard. Snapshot a VM, roll it back if you break it, spin up a Windows 11 VM for a game that refuses to run on Linux. This is the platform.
Persona 3: “I’m building a NAS. Storage integrity is the whole point.”
Answer: TrueNAS Community Edition 25.10 (free)
ZFS. That’s why you’re here. Not the web GUI (though it’s solid), not the apps, not anything else. TrueNAS exists because ZFS is the most battle-tested filesystem for data integrity on the planet, and TrueNAS wraps it in a usable interface. If your box is primarily for storing irreplaceable data, this is the right answer.
Persona 4: “I want the easiest possible experience, I have mismatched drives, and I’m okay paying once”
Answer: Unraid 7 ($49 to $249 one-time, read the fine print)
Unraid’s superpower is its parity array that handles drives of different sizes without waste. ZFS pools don’t mix drive sizes well. Unraid does. Pair that with Community Applications (the largest one-click self-hosted app catalog of any NAS platform) and you have the most beginner-friendly experience of the three. The catch, which I’ll get into below, is that “one-time” has gotten more complicated since 2024.
Proxmox VE 9.2: The Hypervisor for People Who Want to Do Everything
Proxmox VE is a type-1 hypervisor, which means it sits directly on bare metal. There’s no “host operating system” underneath it. It boots, and you get a web dashboard at port 8006 where you manage everything.
Two container/VM technologies live side by side:
- KVM virtual machines: full virtualization. Windows, macOS (with effort), any Linux distro. Hardware passthrough for GPUs, USB devices, NVMe drives. Near-native performance.
- LXC containers: lightweight Linux containers. Think of these as Docker containers that act more like full machines. They share the host kernel, boot in seconds, use a fraction of the RAM a VM would. Pi-hole in an LXC container uses maybe 50 MB of RAM total.
LXC is the part most comparisons gloss over. For someone running 8 self-hosted services, LXC containers on Proxmox can handle all 8 using less memory combined than a single VM would. The tradeoff is that LXC is Linux-only (no Windows containers, no macOS) and less familiar than Docker Compose to people coming from the Docker world.
What Proxmox does not do well: casual point-and-click app installation. There’s no app store. You install services either via LXC templates, a community script library called Proxmox VE Helper Scripts (widely used, well maintained), or by creating a VM and doing it the traditional way inside. It’s powerful. It is not simple.
The Proxmox VE Helper Scripts library (community-maintained at tteck.github.io/Proxmox) gives you one-line LXC installs for the most popular self-hosted services. A Pi-hole LXC, for example, is literally:
bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/ct/pihole.sh)"That runs directly in the Proxmox shell and spins up a Pi-hole container in about 90 seconds. It’s not a GUI, but it’s also not complicated once you know it exists. Most beginners don’t know it exists.
The learning curve is real. If you’re not already comfortable with a Linux terminal, plan for a weekend of tutorials before you’re productive. The documentation is excellent. The community since the post-Broadcom ESXi migration has grown enormously. Help is available. But this is not a GUI-first experience.
Cost: Free. The paid subscription runs around €120/CPU socket/year for the community tier (check proxmox.com/pricing since it’s EUR-denominated and fluctuates with exchange rates), up to higher tiers for enterprise support and stable package repos. For home use, the community repos (configured in about 30 seconds) give you the full feature set at no cost.
Best hardware fit: Works beautifully on that mini PC from the April post. 8 GB RAM is enough for LXC-heavy workloads. 16 GB is comfortable if you want to run VMs alongside containers.
TrueNAS Community Edition 25.10 (Goldeye): Built Around ZFS
Before anything else: a name disambiguation, because this platform has had three names in four years and it confuses everyone.
- TrueNAS CORE: the original, FreeBSD-based, now in maintenance mode
- TrueNAS SCALE: the Linux-based successor, actively developed through 2024
- TrueNAS Community Edition: the new official name for TrueNAS SCALE, launched with Fangtooth 25.04 and currently at 25.10 “Goldeye”
Same product. New branding. If you Google “TrueNAS SCALE” and land on old documentation, you’re reading about the same thing. Don’t let it trip you up.
The current stable release is 25.10.4 “Goldeye.” The 25.04 “Fangtooth” release earlier this year is what formally introduced the Community Edition branding and unified the CORE and SCALE codebases. Goldeye builds on that with Docker-based apps infrastructure, LXC container support via Incus, and RAIDZ expansion improvements. It’s a genuinely strong release cycle.
So What Is ZFS and Why Does It Matter?
ZFS stores a checksum with every block of data. Every time you read a file, ZFS verifies the checksum. If something doesn’t match, it knows the data is corrupted, and if you have redundancy configured, it repairs it automatically. Silently, without you doing anything.
Traditional filesystems (ext4, NTFS, even btrfs to some degree) do not do this by default. Bit rot is a real thing. Over years of continuous operation, hard drives develop bad sectors, RAM errors corrupt data in transit, and you end up with files that are slightly wrong in ways that won’t show up until you try to open them. ZFS catches that.
If you’re archiving family photos, video files, important documents, irreplaceable data, ZFS is worth the learning curve. If your server is running stateless services where you can always rebuild from scratch, it matters less.
What TrueNAS does not do well: it wants to own your storage. The ZFS pool design is rigid by design. You can’t casually throw a random 4 TB drive into an existing pool the way Unraid handles it. You plan your storage pools upfront, add expansion by creating new vdevs, and the system expects you to know what you’re doing. That’s the right tradeoff for data integrity. It’s wrong for casual mixed-drive storage.
The apps ecosystem (Docker-based as of Goldeye 25.10) works but has historically been the platform’s weakest point. It’s improved significantly. It’s still not as smooth as Unraid Community Applications or a clean Proxmox LXC setup.
Cost: Free. iXsystems sells enterprise support and hardware, but the software is fully open-source with no feature restrictions.
Best hardware fit: TrueNAS wants multiple drives. A single-drive mini PC is not where this platform shines. If you’re building a purpose-built NAS with 4+ drives, this is the OS.
Unraid 7: The Most Accessible, With a License Cost You Should Understand
Unraid’s pitch is simple. Any drive, any size, any age, thrown together into a parity array. Lose one drive, you lose nothing. The flexibility is genuine and it’s the thing ZFS can’t match. A RAIDZ1 pool needs drives of the same size. Unraid doesn’t care. Your pile of 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB drives? Fine.
Community Applications is legitimately good. One search box, thousands of pre-configured Docker images, one-click installation. Plex, Jellyfin, Immich, Home Assistant, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, all installable without writing a single line of YAML. For someone coming from zero Linux experience, this is meaningful.
Version 7.3.1 (the current release as of June 2026) builds on 7.3.0, which added internal boot from NVMe or SSD, updated ZFS to 2.4.1, and improved quality-of-life for the VM editor. The 7.3.1 update is a security-focused patch (kernel, Docker, ZFS, and package CVEs). The 7.x series also added snapshot support that was long overdue.
The License Cost Has Changed. Here’s the Real Math.
This is the thing that most 2024-and-earlier guides still get wrong, and it matters.
Unraid used to be a one-time purchase at three tiers (Basic, Plus, Pro). That model ended in 2024. The current structure as of 2026:
| License Tier | Upfront Cost | Year 1 Updates | After Year 1 | 3-Year Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 | Included | $36/yr optional renewal | ~$121 |
| Unleashed | $109 | Included | $36/yr optional renewal | ~$181 |
| Lifetime | $249 | Included | Nothing | $249 |
A few notes on this. The renewal fee is optional in that Unraid keeps working without it. You can keep running your current version forever. You just don’t get major version upgrades. For most people running a home server that isn’t changing much, this is fine. If you like staying current, $36/yr is reasonable. If you want to buy once and forget it, Lifetime at $249 is now the clean option.
Compare to Proxmox (free) and TrueNAS Community Edition (free) and the cost becomes a real factor. Not a dealbreaker if Unraid’s mix-drive flexibility is what you need. But know what you’re signing up for.
What Unraid does not do well: serious data integrity for critical data. Parity protects you from a single drive failure. It does not do ZFS-style per-block checksumming. If a bit flips silently on a drive, parity doesn’t catch it. For media storage and Docker containers, that’s probably fine. For irreplaceable financial records, medical files, or anything you genuinely cannot re-create, TrueNAS and ZFS are the right call.
The Comparison Table
| Platform | Cost | Primary Strength | Containers | Learning Curve | Pick This If |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu Server + Docker | Free | Docker familiarity, massive docs | Docker / Compose | Low-Medium | You just want containers and nothing else |
| Proxmox VE 9.2 | Free | VMs + LXC, type-1 hypervisor | LXC (+ Docker inside VMs) | Medium-High | You want real VMs and service isolation |
| TrueNAS CE 25.10 | Free | ZFS data integrity, NAS | Docker apps + LXC (Incus) | Medium | Your box IS the NAS and data integrity matters |
| Unraid 7 | $49-$249 (see TCO table) | Mixed-drive parity, easy GUI | Docker (Community Apps) | Low | You have mixed drives and want click-to-install apps |
What About That Mini PC from the April Post?
If you’re running the N100 or similar mini PC we talked about in the beginner server guide, here’s the honest answer per platform:
Ubuntu Server + Docker: perfect fit. This is what we set up. No reason to change.
Proxmox: works great. Proxmox runs well on 8 GB RAM with LXC containers. 16 GB is more comfortable if you want to run a Windows VM alongside your container workloads. The N100’s integrated Intel UHD GPU does hardware transcoding on Jellyfin inside an LXC without issue.
TrueNAS: not the right fit for a single-drive mini PC. TrueNAS wants multiple drives to do what it’s good at. You can install it on a single drive and run it as an apps platform, but you’re paying for ZFS storage capabilities you’re not using. It’s fine. Just not the best use of the platform.
Unraid: underwhelming fit for a mini PC with a single NVMe. Unraid’s whole value proposition is in its parity array across multiple physical drives. On a single-drive mini PC, you’re paying for a license to run Docker containers on a platform that’s worse at Docker than Ubuntu Server.
If you want to upgrade the April setup, the one move that makes sense is adding a Proxmox install to get VMs. Otherwise, stay put.
One More Thing: The Two-Box Architecture
Here’s something the Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid “which one wins” articles never mention. Serious homelabbers frequently run both Proxmox and TrueNAS on separate boxes. Proxmox handles compute, VMs, and containers. TrueNAS handles storage. The two talk to each other over NFS or iSCSI.
This isn’t for beginners. But it’s worth knowing because it reframes the “Proxmox vs TrueNAS” question. The real answer for someone building out a homelab over time isn’t “pick one.” It’s “Proxmox first, TrueNAS later when you have a dedicated NAS box.”
Unraid tries to do both in one box (compute + NAS). For a single-box homelab, that’s fine. Once you’re comfortable, splitting the roles across two machines is the natural evolution.
Sources
- Proxmox VE Documentation (official wiki covering KVM, LXC, and configuration)
- Proxmox VE 9.2 Release Announcement (Debian 13 base, current stable version)
- Proxmox LXC Container Documentation (LXC vs KVM explained by the Proxmox team)
- TrueNAS Fangtooth 25.04 Release Blog (introduced the Community Edition branding)
- TrueNAS Community Edition Launch (SCALE renaming to Community Edition explained)
- TrueNAS Software Status (current stable release tracker, 25.10.4 as of June 2026)
- TrueNAS Community Edition 25.10 Documentation
- Unraid New License Pricing (official announcement of the 2024 pricing change)
- Unraid Licensing FAQ (official docs on tiers and renewal terms)
- Unraid 7.3.1 Release Notes (current stable version, May 2026)
- TechFuel HQ: Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid 2026
- Need to Know IT: Homelab OS Comparison
So Which One Should You Actually Run?
If I had to give you one sentence each:
Already running Docker containers and that’s all you need? Don’t change anything.
Want VMs and isolation and don’t mind a learning curve? Proxmox. Free, powerful, the community is huge right now.
Building a dedicated NAS and care about your data? TrueNAS Community Edition. ZFS is worth it for that use case.
Have mismatched drives and want click-to-install everything? Unraid. Understand the TCO before you commit.
The real pro tip: none of these choices is permanent. Proxmox and TrueNAS both install in under 15 minutes on a spare drive. Try them in a VM first if you’re curious. You can always wipe and start over.
Which platform did you land on? Are you sticking with Ubuntu Server or making the jump? Drop it in the comments. I read every one and I’m genuinely curious which direction the folks from the April post went.
