Eight.ly vs Competitors¶

Eight.ly isn't the only homelab OS. Unraid, TrueNAS, Proxmox, and Portainer each solve a piece of the homelab puzzle. This page compares them honestly so you can decide which fits your setup.

Feature comparison¶

Installation and architecture¶

Eight.ly's backend compiles to one Go binary, so there's no Python, Java, or PHP runtime to manage underneath it. Updates through Featherfall are automatic and reversible — a failed health check after an update rolls both the binary and the dashboard back on its own.

vs Unraid ($59-$129 one-time)¶

Unraid is the incumbent homelab OS. It has a mature community, years of stability, and a well-understood plugin ecosystem. It earned its reputation.

What Unraid does well:

• Battle-tested community with thousands of forum posts for troubleshooting
• Stable parity-protected array that's been refined over many years
• Plugin ecosystem that extends functionality (though plugins vary in quality)
• Simple "just works" experience for basic NAS + Docker setups

Where Eight.ly pulls ahead:

Breadth is the first difference. Unraid's Community Applications catalog has roughly 200 apps. Eight.ly ships 3,200+ curated templates, all standard Docker Compose files — no proprietary template format, no XML configs.

Nova is something Unraid doesn't have at all. Instead of reading wiki pages to figure out how to check a drive's SMART status or create a VM, you ask Nova in plain English — and when something's actually wrong, Nova goes and looks at the logs and the service state instead of just answering from a script.

Unraid requires a USB boot key and limits drive count by license tier. Eight.ly installs to any drive — SSD, NVMe, USB, whatever you have — with no hardware-locked licensing. If your USB key dies, your Unraid server is down until you transfer the license; Eight.ly has no such single point of failure.

On storage, Eight.ly ships SnapRAID + MergerFS — the same mixed-drive-size flexibility Unraid users already like — and ZFS alongside it, on the same box.

The web terminal in Eight.ly includes tmux support — persistent sessions that survive browser disconnects. Unraid requires SSH for command-line access.

And if a box running Eight.ly in a cluster goes down, Rehome fences it and relocates its workload to another node automatically, then brings it home when the box comes back — Unraid has no equivalent for a single dead machine.

Pricing comparison:

vs TrueNAS SCALE (free)¶

TrueNAS has an enterprise heritage that shows. Its ZFS implementation is battle-tested, replication is robust, and for a pure NAS appliance it's hard to beat — especially at the price of free.

What TrueNAS does well:

• ZFS implementation with years of enterprise testing
• Robust replication for offsite backup and disaster recovery
• iSCSI support for block-level storage
• Free with no feature gates on the storage side

Where Eight.ly pulls ahead:

The core trade-off is flexibility. TrueNAS requires ZFS, which means all drives in a vdev must be the same size — a mix of 4TB, 8TB, and 12TB drives from different upgrade cycles wastes capacity on each smaller drive. Eight.ly runs ZFS too, so you're not giving it up, but you can also run SnapRAID + MergerFS on the same box and mix any drive sizes, adding drives one at a time without rebuilding anything. Where TrueNAS is still ahead: it has years more operational depth around ZFS, and Eight.ly has no dashboard flow yet for importing a foreign pool.

TrueNAS's app catalog moved from a Kubernetes-based system to Docker, and remains smaller than Eight.ly's 3,200+.

TrueNAS also has no AI assistant, no built-in web terminal with tmux, and no dedicated mobile app. Its monitoring requires the separate TrueCommand tool.

vs Proxmox VE (free)¶

Proxmox is the best open-source hypervisor available. Its VM management, clustering, and LXC container support are genuinely enterprise-grade. If your primary use case is many VMs with live migration and HA clustering across a real cluster, Proxmox is purpose-built for that.

What Proxmox does well:

• Enterprise-grade virtualization with live migration
• Mature HA clustering across multiple nodes
• LXC containers with fine-grained resource control
• Ceph integration for distributed storage
• Extensive API for automation

Where Eight.ly pulls ahead:

Proxmox is a hypervisor, not a homelab OS. It has no app catalog, no file sharing UI, no storage pooling for mixed drives, and no AI assistant — every "homelab" feature requires manual setup inside a VM or LXC container.

Eight.ly covers both sides: KVM/QEMU VMs with noVNC console access, plus a 3,200+ app catalog, NAS storage, Nova, and a web terminal for everything else. For a small cluster, Eight.ly's Breezeway and Rehome give you live migration and automatic failover without Proxmox's setup overhead.

That said, if you're running a large multi-node cluster with Ceph storage, Proxmox's clustering is more mature and battle-tested at that scale. Eight.ly targets the single-server or small-cluster homelab, not a datacenter.

vs Portainer (free CE / paid Business)¶

Portainer is a solid container management UI. The free Community Edition gives you a clean interface for managing Docker containers, stacks, and volumes, plus Kubernetes support.

What Portainer does well:

• Clean, intuitive UI for Docker management
• Multi-environment support (manage multiple Docker hosts)
• Kubernetes support alongside Docker
• Free Community Edition covers most use cases
• Lightweight — it's just a container itself

Where Eight.ly pulls ahead:

Portainer is only container management. There's no app store or curated catalog, no NAS storage, no file sharing, no VM management, no AI assistant. It's a single-purpose tool, not an operating system.

Eight.ly includes everything Portainer does (Docker management with a web UI) plus the 3,200+ app catalog, Nova, SnapRAID + MergerFS or ZFS storage, SMB/NFS file sharing, KVM/QEMU VMs, a web terminal, and the free Backup Server.

Portainer also requires an existing Docker host to run on — you still install and manage the underlying OS yourself. Eight.ly is the whole stack.

Which should you choose?¶

Still deciding?¶

A fresh Eight.ly OS install runs a free 30-day trial with every feature on, App Store included — the lowest-risk way to see how the app catalog and Nova compare to what you're using today. See current pricing when you're ready to activate.