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Why I picked Proxmox over ESXi and unRaid

I run Proxmox in the homelab. Before that I ran ESXi free, then a brief unRaid experiment. Here’s the honest comparison of why I landed on Proxmox.

The three options

VMware ESXi (free tier, pre-Broadcom)

  • Free, then Broadcom killed the free tier in 2024
  • Excellent hardware support
  • The vSphere client is genuinely good
  • The free version had a hard cap on cores per host and a hard cap on the number of hosts
  • Locked to VMware hardware compatibility list for anything that needs driver support

unRaid

  • USB-boot, pay-once, $59 for the basic license
  • Excellent for media servers and Docker-heavy workloads
  • The array-based storage is unique and works well for spinning rust
  • VMs are a second-class citizen compared to Docker containers
  • The community and the app store are great
  • Single-node only (no clustering without unRaid Premium, which is more)

Proxmox VE

  • Open source, AGPL, free for any size
  • KVM + LXC + Ceph built in
  • Debian-based, so apt works
  • The web UI is functional and getting better
  • Real multi-node clustering
  • The community and the docs are excellent
  • Backed by a company that sells support, not a hosted offering

What I needed

  • Multi-node clustering (I had three nodes, not one)
  • VMs and containers, both, mixed
  • Live migration (move a running VM from one node to another)
  • A real API for scripting
  • ZFS or Ceph, not a hardware RAID card
  • Something I can run for 10 years without a license surprise

ESXi failed the Broadcom-license test the moment Broadcom bought VMware. unRaid failed the multi-node test (single-node is fine for some people, not for me). Proxmox passed everything.

The thing I miss about ESXi

The vSphere client’s “console” view. The little thumbnail screen for each VM, with the power state visible at a glance. Proxmox has a similar view in the web UI. It’s a bit slower to render. Not a deal-breaker.

The other thing I miss: the consistency of the ESXi hardware compatibility list. When I had a weird NIC on a node, ESXi either supported it out of the box or it didn’t. Proxmox is Debian, so anything Debian supports usually works, but occasionally I hit a driver that needs a kernel module recompile. That happens once a year. Not a deal-breaker.

The thing I miss about unRaid

The app store. The unRaid Community Applications plugin is the single best home-server app catalog in any of the three platforms. Proxmox doesn’t have an equivalent. The closest is the helper scripts at tteck/Proxmox (now maintained at community-scripts/Proxmox-Developer), which give you one-shot installs of common containers and VMs. Those scripts are great. They’re not an app store.

If I were running a single-node media server and a few Docker containers, I’d pick unRaid. If I were running a small business and needed commercial support, I’d pick ESXi (paid) or Nutanix. For a multi-node homelab that I want to tinker with for the next decade, Proxmox is the right answer.

The actual reason I picked Proxmox

I read the source. Proxmox is Debian plus a set of well-organized web UIs and CLIs. When something goes wrong, I can ssh into a node and look at what’s happening with regular Linux tools. With ESXi, the recovery path is “reboot and hope.” With unRaid, the recovery path is “boot from USB and hope.”

With Proxmox, the recovery path is “ssh in and fix the thing.” That’s the only reason that matters.

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