This question comes up early and often in home lab communities, and the honest answer is that it’s mostly the wrong question. Proxmox and TrueNAS aren’t really competing for the same job. Once you understand what each one actually does, the choice tends to make itself.

Proxmox: Compute First

Proxmox VE is a bare-metal hypervisor. Install it on a machine, open the web UI, and you’re spinning up VMs and LXC containers within minutes. Everything lives under one roof: VM management, container management, snapshots, backups, ZFS storage pools, and if you have multiple machines, clustering.

What Proxmox is good at:

• Running multiple VMs and containers on a single host
• LXC containers for lightweight services (Pi-hole, Home Assistant, etc.)
• Snapshotting before you do something risky
• PCIe passthrough for GPU or HBA access from a VM
• Building a multi-node cluster if you expand

If you picked up one of the mini PCs from the hardware guide, Proxmox is almost certainly the first thing you should put on it. It turns one box into a platform that can run a dozen different services simultaneously.

TrueNAS: Storage First

TrueNAS is an operating system built around ZFS and designed to manage drives reliably at any scale. The whole interface is oriented toward storage: creating pools, setting up shares, configuring replication, monitoring drive health. It does this extremely well.

Two flavors exist: TrueNAS CORE (FreeBSD-based, mature, pure NAS) and TrueNAS SCALE (Debian-based, supports Docker apps and Kubernetes). CORE has the longer track record for pure file serving. SCALE is more flexible if you want to run a few services alongside your NAS. Most new installs are gravitating toward SCALE.

TrueNAS excels at:

• ZFS pool management with a proper UI
• SMB, NFS, and iSCSI sharing configured in a few clicks
• Snapshot schedules and replication to off-site storage
• Drive health monitoring beyond standard SMART
• Bit-rot protection through ZFS checksums and scrubs

Worth reading the NAS drives guide before you buy disks — not all drives play nice with ZFS under heavy load.

The Real Comparison

	Proxmox	TrueNAS
Primary purpose	Compute / virtualization	Storage / NAS
Best for	Running VMs and containers	Managing many drives reliably
App ecosystem	VMs + LXC containers	SCALE: Docker/K8s, CORE: jails
Storage management	Functional but minimal	Excellent
Virtualization	Excellent	Basic (SCALE only)

Use Proxmox if your main goal is running multiple services, learning virtualization, or maximizing what you get out of a single machine.

Use TrueNAS if you’re building a dedicated NAS — multiple drives, SMB shares for the whole house, a proper ZFS pool managed through a UI built specifically for that job.

For a lot of home labs, the answer is both.

Running TrueNAS Inside Proxmox

This is one of the most popular patterns in r/homelab, and it’s what I run: Proxmox on bare metal, TrueNAS as a VM, with an HBA card passed through directly to TrueNAS so ZFS has raw disk access.

Why it works well:

• One machine handles compute and storage
• HBA passthrough means ZFS sees the drives directly — no virtualization layer between TrueNAS and the disks
• You can still run other VMs alongside TrueNAS for media servers, dev environments, whatever
• Proxmox snapshots of the TrueNAS VM give you a recovery layer beyond ZFS snapshots

The trade-offs:

• RAM requirements go up. TrueNAS wants 8-16GB for ZFS, Proxmox needs its share, and so do your other VMs. Plan for 32GB minimum.
• If Proxmox goes down, your storage goes with it. A dedicated TrueNAS box doesn’t have this dependency.
• HBA compatibility isn’t universal — LSI cards in IT mode (9207-8i, 9300-series) are the standard recommendation.

If other people rely on your NAS — family members streaming Plex, shared file storage — a dedicated TrueNAS machine is safer. If it’s just you and you’re comfortable managing the Proxmox layer, the consolidated approach works well and saves hardware costs.

Where to Start

Start with Proxmox. Install it, learn to create VMs and containers, run a few services. Its built-in ZFS support handles local storage fine for early experiments.

Add TrueNAS when you have enough drives that a dedicated storage UI makes sense, or when you need to share storage reliably across your network. At that point you’ll know whether you want it as a VM inside Proxmox or on its own hardware.

There’s no wrong answer. Both platforms are free, well-documented, and have active communities. The best home lab is the one that’s actually running.