Unraid

You want an easier DIY NAS route than TrueNAS. You plan to mix drive sizes and expand gradually. You care heavily about Docker apps, media services and VMs. You are moving from a turnkey NAS and want less friction. You accept a paid licence in exchange for a more guided software experience.

We will look at the best Unraid alternatives below, but please remember that there isn’t an individual alternative that is best. Each option will be better or worse depending on the requirements!

Unraid is a network-attached storage operating system. Unraid lets you create, manage, and delete shared folders, and run applications (even create and run Docker containers). Unraid isn’t a traditional hypervisor, but it gives you the ability to create virtual machines if needed. Unraid is incredibly user-friendly in my opinion. From my experience, a lot of NAS operating systems are confusing when you first set them up, but Unraid makes sense, meaning that you’ll get used to it quickly. Please keep in mind that Unraid is not free, so you must purchase a license based on the number of hard dri

Home lab users who want UnRAID without building a full DIY box from scratch. Plex and Jellyfin users who want a quiet SSD NAS for libraries, metadata, apps and local serving. Small-office users who value low noise, compact size and flash responsiveness over huge capacity. Docker users who want enough included memory to run several light services. Buyers who find the N1 at a strong price and do not need 10GbE.