Questions about TRUENAS compared to QNAP

TrueNAS General
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Hello everyone, quick question and please I’m new here so forgive me if it’s the wrong place to ask but didn’t seem straightforward to find a place to ask question in general,

  1. What’s the pro and cons of TRUENAS over the QNAP eco system?
  2. What does TRUENAS offer that QNAP doesn’t and visa-versa?
  3. can TRUENAS replace the QNAP OS? If so what’s the documented steps to install.
  4. How fast is TRUENAS compared to the QNAP OS?
  5. What’s the App ecosystem for TRUENAS?
  6. If these questions have been answered before, please point me to the posts answering them.

Craftywoodworks

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  1. Pro: Open source, free to use on your own hardware, argubly cheaper if you buy used hardware. Con: Qnap has smartphone apps ready to download with buildin apps which have to be set up manually in truenas via apps, e.g. file explorer or picture syncs.
  2. I’d say longer support for the OS on your hardware. My old qnap stopped getting updates because it was to old. On the other hand i’ve seen ppl comment here on the forum that they used the same hardware with (then) freenas and updated it through all available versions to the current one.
  3. Depends on the hardware but there are multiple users that documented their qnap to truenas migration e.g.
    QNAP TS-877 Truenas Journal
    Possible to install TrueNAS on QNAP TS-464eU hardware?
  4. Also entirely dependend on the hardware (which hardware you compare to which qnap system)
  5. As of Truenas 24.10 it uses docker for its apps system. You can either use the catalogue apps or your own compose files to deploy apps in truenas.
2 Likes
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There really is no comparison. QNAP is a hardware provider that locks you into proprietary hardware and software. They also are TERRIBLE at security (I mean, google it, they suck big time) and they generally don’t care about their users. They also will drop you for support. If you are looking at a hardware NAS provider, Unfi and Synology are WAY better TBH.

Truenas gives you ultimate freedom and configurability. Bring your own hardware, upgrade as you need. Truenas is stable, well maintained, has had few security issues and most of them have been upstream and resolved very quickly. I would run away from any QNAP thoughts.

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Unifi? Don’t get me wrong, I like their hardware, but their software is pure trash. No way I would trust a network company that only partially supports IPv6 in 2026 to handle my files. Apparently they have a new ZFS product, but it is AFAIK unclear if the use real ZFS or some wonky incompatible ZFS fork like QNAP does.

Synology is also pure trash. They are a business storage company. You would like to have sshd but with password auth disabled? You know, like most many OS have as default for security reasons? Well to bad! Not only do we not follow that security best practice, we also don’t offer it in our GUI. You want to manually set it in cli? Haha, sure go ahead and edit sshd. To bad we overwrite it at every boot!

I personally can’t take such companies seriously.

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Beyond being not at all helpful in your response, you certainly did not understand my post. UniFi is actually trying to be better, they are implementing ZFS on their enterprise NAS, however, I stated they were BETTER than QNAP, which is complete trash (compared to the other 2, which are kind of trash (synology) and improving but not great (UniFi)).

Truenas is the way, but not for someone that just wants to run a NAS in a can.