Proxmox and ESXi have long been competitors at the top of the virtualization world, with the open-source Proxmox increasingly gaining market share, both among home lab enthuiasts and businesses, since its first series of releases in 2008. ESXi now represents a bit of a dinosaur past, the kind of bloated enterprise package that isn't exactly easy to pick up and learn about. It's incredibly powerful and has been a core component of plenty of massive data centers supporting thousands of virtual machines. Still, it relies on a model that's facing increased competition from the cloud.

But which is better? Should you go with overkill from the start for your home lab, or is the open-source power of Proxmox more than enough? Well, spoiler alert: it's almost certainly the latter, with ESXi increasingly going off a cliff over the last few years. With that in mind, here are some of our most significant reasons why Proxmox is the better choice for your home lab.

3 Proxmox is free

Broadcom really dropped the ball with this one

ESXi has long had a free tier, allowing personal users to use a limited version of the hypervisor without splurging on an expensive license designed for enterprises. However, since Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023, the licensing model for many VMware products has changed. There have been plenty of controversial changes here, and it's fair to say that Broadcom has a less-than-favorable reputation with businesses and developers alike. Many companies have seen order-of-magnitude increases in their pricing for VMware tools, and personal users are now entirely locked out with the removal of free licenses.

If you do purchase a license for ESXi, expect to find many advanced features locked behind other licensing. VMware's licensing has rarely been simple at the best of times, and these recent changes have made it even more complicated.

On the flip side, Proxmox is FOSS, released under the AGPLv3. It's supported through enterprise support tiers, which offer private repository access and enterprise support, with guaranteed response times and other business-oriented features.

2 Built-in container support

We could go on here

Okay, putting bare-bones pricing aside (for now), is Proxmox actually better than ESXi? Well, that question depends on your workload. Both have a vast range of features, some of which require additional licensing in EXSi's case and many of which are entirely free for Proxmox. Personally, one of the biggest things I enjoy and make use of in Proxmox, which is lacking in ESXi, is integrated container support. Proxmox makes it easy to bring your own LXC-based containers and run them easily within Proxmox. This saves either having a dedicated container host (and ending up virtualizing a container runtime) or skipping containers entirely.

VMware does mitigate this somewhat, providing the vSphere integrated containers runtime for vSphere, though this has some caveats (including that it doesn't seem to run a container natively, instead quietly spinning up an entire virtual machine runtime in the background) and seems difficult to get running in an ESXi context. Proxmox, on the flip side, makes this easy and transparent.

1 Storage flexibility

Bring your own distributed storage or ZFS

In an ongoing trend here, Proxmox supports a wide range of open storage standards, including familiar standards like ZFS (with its advanced features) and Ceph, a popular distributed storage solution. Proxmox's proximity to the Debian distro running underneath it makes interacting with Debian's storage concepts, like LVMs, easy for an experienced admin. ESXi, in comparison, makes storage a nightmare, locking many features like distributed storage and alternative storage backends behind licensing tiers, including things like replication and snapshots.

ESXi isn't really designed for home use any more

While the title and premise of this article are clear, the unfortunate conclusion is that ESXi isn't really designed for home use anymore. Whether you're a developer or homelabber with a personal setup, we'd suggest looking to migrate away from ESXi soon, as many prominent companies already are. Broadcom has made it clear with its acquisition of VMware that the old regime is changing. While ESXi was always notorious for incredibly complex licensing, locking all kinds of features behind different add-ons, components, and feature sets, the recent ramp in price has been too much for many businesses.

Given the relatively low weight Broadcom clearly gives to its free user base for ESXi, we wouldn't recommend installing even an older version now or buying a license for personal use. The rug has been pulled before, and it's not clear whether any basic subscription will be viable in the future without an endless stream of upgrades and add-ons to keep it functioning.

We could certainly go on with this list. There are plenty of great, free features supported in Proxmox that are, at the very least, expensive in ESXi, but the message likely wouldn't change.