As a homelab user of TN, I doubt this will affect me much, but I’m curious what others think about it? I have been putting off an upgrade after reading about the recent change preventing users from being added to security groups. Having been in the self-hosted community for decades, I’ve done the cursory research into alternatives just in case. There’s nothing worse than having the rug pulled out from under you.
AI’s take on alternatives to TN worth consdering:
For an engineer, the TrueNAS build system closure is the “final straw” in a series of shifts toward a more corporate, less transparent product. If you’re looking to jump ship or at least “de-risk” your storage, the landscape in 2026 has bifurcated into two camps: The “Appliance” crowd (UI-first) and The “Hypervisor” crowd (CLI/ZFS-first).
Here are the top-rated alternatives people are migrating to right now:
1. The “Community Darling”: OpenMediaVault (OMV)
If you want the closest thing to “TrueNAS but actually Open Source,” this is it.
The Vibe: It’s essentially a web-GUI wrapper for a standard Debian install.
Why Engineers love it: It doesn’t try to “own” your OS. You can SSH in and run standard apt commands without the system fighting you. It uses the openmediavault-kernel plugin to give you easy access to ZFS.
The Catch: The UI is “functional” (read: looks like it’s from 2012), and it lacks the polished “one-click” app ecosystem that TrueNAS SCALE has.
2. The Power Move: Proxmox + “Samba LXC”
A massive chunk of the TrueNAS user base is moving to Proxmox bare-metal and handling storage “The Linux Way.”
The Setup: You manage your ZFS pools directly in Proxmox (which has excellent native ZFS support). For file sharing (SMB/NFS), you don’t run a heavy VM; you run a tiny LXC container (using about 50MB of RAM) that bind-mounts the ZFS datasets.
Why Engineers love it: Complete control. No “middleware” between you and your data. If you want to change a kernel parameter or add a specific driver (like for an old GPU TrueNAS dropped support for), you just do it.
The Catch: No “pretty” dashboard to manage your SMB users or permissions; you’re back to editing config files or using a lightweight tool like Cockpit.
3. The New Contender: HexOS
HexOS is the “Wildcard” of 2026. It’s a new NAS OS that actually uses TrueNAS SCALE as its backbone but replaces the entire UI/management layer.
The Vibe: “TrueNAS for people who hate the TrueNAS UI.” It’s incredibly fast, lightweight, and Docker-centric.
The Controversy: It’s currently a “Powered by TrueNAS” partner, which makes some engineers nervous that it’s just another layer of abstraction that could go closed-source later.
The Catch: It’s currently in a rapid-development phase and may lack some of the deep enterprise features (like fiber channel support) found in SCALE.
4. The “Old Faithful”: Unraid
The Vibe: Still the king of “mismatched drives.”
2026 Update: Unraid has significantly improved its ZFS integration, making it a viable alternative for those who want ZFS data integrity but the famous Unraid “ease of use.”
The Catch: It’s paid and closed-source. For the engineer who is leaving TrueNAS because of “Open Source purity,” Unraid is usually a non-starter.
I couldn’t care less if the build system would remain open source or stays closed forever. I never intended to build truenas from source anyway. And i doubt the majority of users has done it or ever intended to do it themselfes.
As long as truenas provides the features it does today (and it was stated multiple times that it will) i will keep using truenas.
And i have yet so see that “majority” that’s migrating to proxmox…
HexOS wouldn’t be an alternative since it still uses truenas under the hood. Anyone that’s crying about the closed build system on truenas should cry about it for hexos too…
Afaik HexOS has an additional layer of closed source backend code on top of TrueNAS as well. So not only would you be using the same build system, you’d have less transparency in the final product.
C’mon @Johnny_Fartpants .. that’s not MY quote! I actually like the TN UI. And I looked around for a thread before I posted this, but that one never appeared in the preview or first page.. or I missed it. I’ll check that out.
Im not a Truenas fanboy. I criticize them for the bait and switch game they did with Incus, and them pushing “experimental” features onto the community, claiming first they are the best thing since sliced bread.. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
But I dont get the hyperbole about the build scripts going internal. 99.9% of all Truenas users probably never had, have or will care.
And that LLM slop just proves my point.
Proxmox and SMB, OMV and… seriously HEX OS??? Was that model on crack ?
There’s a thread about this already, it contains every possible answer you could want.
To make a long story short it comes down to what and who you trust.
It is more about what it signals. The open source is not really open if you are unable to build (the free parts of) the appliance image to get the same end result. Regardless of how many people actually care. Even when iX has a full right and their reasons to do that, it is a freedom taken away from the users and quite a lot of folks at least slightly involved in the FOSS community is sensitive to that happening.
Having said that, discussing some AI slop that even the OP himself distances from makes little sense to me and everything has been probably already told in that other thread.
I don’t mean deterministic builds. I mean the ability to fork and build an image, with a few or a lot of changes, if the community is unhappy with the direction of - again, strictly the open part - of the software. Clearly iX does not want to make that easy, that’s understandable. But that is also part of the FOSS experience people are used to, and forks do happen for many reasons.
For example, OPNsense includes in their rationale from a decade ago: “… We want to make it easier for people to join and help to build the community. With pfSense, this has been rather difficult, as the tools to build it are difficult to use and often do not work in the first few attempts. And since 2014 they are not freely available any more …”
