For years, TrueNAS and Proxmox have been seen as two different tools for two different jobs. TrueNAS is the operating system you install when storage is the priority, with ZFS underneath and a feature set built for keeping data intact across drive failures, bitrot, and everything else that can go wrong with spinning drives. Proxmox, on the other hand, is the hypervisor of choice for running virtual machines and LXC containers, backed by a clustering and high availability story that's quietly been the backbone of countless homelabs. It's not uncommon to run TrueNAS inside of a Proxmox VM, so long as you do your drive passthroughs correctly.
But with TrueNAS 26, those lines are getting blurrier than they've ever been before. The latest beta from iXsystems brings LXC containers, high availability for those containers, GPU passthrough, and a web UI that keeps inching closer to the kind of dashboard you'd expect from a hypervisor-first platform. It's not a rebrand, and iXsystems would almost certainly never phrase it this way, but if you squint, TrueNAS 26 feels like a response to the homelab users who have been deploying Proxmox alongside their NAS for years.
TrueNAS isn't becoming Proxmox, of course. Storage is still the whole point, and ZFS is still the star of the show. What's changed is that iXsystems clearly isn't content with TrueNAS being just a storage box anymore, and the features rolling out with 26 make that shift look intentional.
LXC containers are fully supported now
They're no longer experimental
LXC containers aren't new to TrueNAS, but their status has been a bit awkward up until now. TrueNAS 25.04 (Fangtooth) shipped them as an experimental feature buried under the Instances tab, alongside the more traditional VM workflow. It worked, but there was always a sense that it was a preview rather than something you'd commit to long-term for critical workloads, and given how iXsystems had made a bunch of changes to virtual machines, it felt like the "experimental" truly meant that you were potentially one update away from having to reconfigure everything. Which isn't really a risk most people want to take with a container that's running their media stack or their reverse proxy.
TrueNAS 26 changes that. LXC is now a fully supported way to run Linux workloads on your NAS, with no migration needed for containers created in prior releases. Which is a relief to anyone who saw the "experimental" label and went along with it anyway.
LXCs are the exact thing Proxmox has been championing for years as a lower-overhead alternative to full VMs, and it's one of the biggest reasons people run Proxmox on hardware that isn't beefy enough to virtualize comfortably. If you've only got 16GB of RAM in your NAS and you want to run a handful of services, VMs eat through that budget fast, while LXCs let you run the same workloads with a fraction of the overhead because they share the host kernel. That's a big deal for low-power hardware that a lot of homelab builds are trending towards. The efficiency gap between a VM and an LXC container isn't subtle once you've got four or five workloads running side-by-side, and now you can get that efficiency on TrueNAS without having to run TrueNAS under Proxmox.
GPU passthrough is another big addition. You can now assign Nvidia and other supported GPUs directly to your LXCs from the container configuration screen, which opens the door to running things like Ollama, Immich with hardware acceleration, or Jellyfin transcoding inside an LXC rather than a pre-composed TrueNAS "app." For anyone who has ever tried to get GPU passthrough working in a Proxmox LXC (and it can be finicky), having this surfaced as a native option in the TrueNAS UI is a welcome change. Users could just use TrueNAS Apps to deploy these, but LXCs give more versatility.
On top of that, you can passthrough USB and PCIe devices to both containers and VMs, after a regression introduced by a nightly build was fixed. If you've got a Zigbee dongle you want to expose to Home Assistant, or a Coral TPU you want handed off to Frigate, you can now.
As already mentioned, any LXCs you created in the past don't need to be migrated or reconfigured. For legacy TrueNAS CORE users who had built their workloads around Jails, LXCs are being positioned as a stable path forward. Jails were one of the most beloved features of the old FreeBSD-based TrueNAS CORE, and their absence from the Linux-based Scale was a big reason some users held off on upgrading for years. Having LXC step into that role with full support, GPU passthrough, and now HA, makes upgrading to Scale a possibility for that group.
High availability is no longer just a VM thing
LXCs can fail over too
One of the features that made Proxmox such a sticky choice for small businesses and prosumers is how well it handles high availability (HA). You can cluster nodes, fail workloads over between them, and keep services running through hardware failures without too much ceremony. It sounds like a feature aimed more at enterprise (and it is), but in practice, it's well within reach for anyone running two or three mini PCs in a cupboard. I've seen people use Proxmox HA for everything from keeping a Nextcloud instance online to making sure a home automation controller doesn't drop commands when a node dies. It's not glamorous, but it's one of the most useful things you can set up in a homelab when you do it right.
TrueNAS has had HA on the Enterprise side for a while, but it was largely scoped to the storage layer itself. If a controller went down, the other one took over and kept your shares online, which, to be fair, is the part of HA that matters most for a NAS. But anything running on top of that storage (a VM, a container, a service) wasn't really part of the failover equation. You could keep the data available, but the workloads consuming that data were still your problem to manage.
With TrueNAS 26, HA now extends to LXC containers, meaning they can fail over between HA controllers if a node goes down. There's a caveat, of course: container failover requires a static IP, and containers using DHCP won't make the jump. That's a reasonable limitation for now, and it's similar to the quirks you'd hit in any HA setup. DHCP-based failover is harder to do reliably than people assume, and forcing a static IP is the better call.
iXsystems is building HA capabilities for both storage redundancy and the compute workloads sitting on top of that storage. It's a big difference to how TrueNAS has been treated in the past, and it directly overlaps with the kind of thing Proxmox users have been doing for years. The HA target audience for TrueNAS has historically been enterprise buyers with matching controllers, so this isn't really aimed at the average homelab setup any time soon. But the fact that compute workloads are in scope at all is a directional change, and it's one that closes a gap that's existed between the two platforms for as long as they've both been around.
The web UI is slowly catching up
WebShare is a big upgrade, too
If you've used TrueNAS Scale over the last few years, you know the web UI has been steadily improving, but you also know it's always felt a bit bolted together. There are menus nested inside menus, terminology that assumes you know what a VDEV is before you even open the dashboard, and a general sense that the UI was designed for people who already knew ZFS rather than people learning it. That's not a criticism of the underlying platform, but it's the reason alternatives like HexOS, built on TrueNAS, exist in the first place. A whole company has grown up around making TrueNAS feel less like an enterprise tool and more like something a regular person can use, and that's only happened because the TrueNAS UI hasn't quite been there.
TrueNAS 26 doesn't tear any of that down, but the refinements continue to stack up. The LXC experience now feels closer to a dedicated virtualization management interface than a tacked-on experiment. The instances view is cleaner, container creation feels more like a guided workflow, and GPU passthrough being a dropdown rather than a manual configuration chore is done just like it would be on Proxmox. You can even share files now through the new WebShare UI. The differences are small, but it was never a bad UI, just convoluted in parts.
That's not to say that it looks anything like Proxmox, and in fact, the two UIs are stylistically worlds apart. The difference is that TrueNAS still feels like a storage-first platform that happens to do compute, while Proxmox feels like a compute-first platform that happens to do storage. In Proxmox, it puts your VMs and containers in the left sidebar as the main thing, with storage as a secondary concern. TrueNAS inverts that, with storage as the anchor and compute hanging off it. Neither approach is wrong, but they're indicative of two very different philosophies about what a server is for, and those philosophies have always been the clearest line dividing the two platforms.
But the functional overlap, the sheer number of things you can now do from the TrueNAS dashboard that you'd previously have only done in Proxmox, is harder to ignore with each release. Creating a container, giving it a GPU, setting up failover, attaching ZFS datasets as volumes, and monitoring resource usage are all things you'd do in Proxmox, and they're all now things you can do in TrueNAS without ever opening a terminal. Whether that's a good thing depends on how you feel about the two projects, but it's clearly the shape TrueNAS is taking.
TrueNAS 26 feels like a direct response to Proxmox
Even if iXsystems wouldn't frame it that way
TrueNAS 26 makes a few other changes alongside the container work. It's the first annual release, dropping the twice-yearly cadence and the fish codenames in favor of simple version numbers like 26.1 and 26.2. OpenZFS 2.4 brings Hybrid Pools, Kernel 6.18 LTS is here too, and there's new functionality like Ransomware Detection and WebShare features that cement the storage-first identity. That's clearly where iXsystems' heart is, and it's where TrueNAS still reigns supreme.
But the LXC changes, the HA extension, and the container UI work aren't incidental, and they're a deliberate move to close the gap for users who have historically either run TrueNAS on one box and Proxmox on another, or TrueNAS as a VM under Proxmox. If you can now run all of those workloads on a single TrueNAS instance, with HA for the containers and ZFS underneath the whole thing, the argument for maintaining two separate operating systems gets weaker.
I don't think iXsystems is trying to kill Proxmox, and I don't think Proxmox should be losing much sleep over any of this. Proxmox's clustering, its VM tooling, and its sheer maturity as a hypervisor are excellent, and TrueNAS isn't competing at that level yet. Multi-node clustering for compute, in particular, is still Proxmox's home turf, and TrueNAS HA remains scoped to paired HA controllers rather than the kind of sprawling cluster you'd build with Proxmox VE. That's a pretty big gap, and I don't see it being closed any time soon. Proxmox also has a head start on tooling that makes day-to-day cluster management tolerable, from snapshots and backup jobs to its well-worn API, and those aren't small advantages when you're running anything in the enterprise world where both of these systems actually make their money.
But for the user who wants one box that does storage properly and runs their LXC workloads without needing a second machine, TrueNAS 26 is making a much stronger case than any previous release. And for the user who was already running TrueNAS for storage and using Proxmox purely because it was the best place to run containers, things are a bit different now.
TrueNAS has always been the NAS operating system you could run containers on if you had to, and its app ecosystem has always been decent. With TrueNAS 26, though, it's starting to feel like the NAS operating system you could feasibly choose to run those applications on. iXsystems wouldn't frame it as a response to Proxmox, because they don't need to, as both platforms serve overlapping yet distinct audiences. But intentional or not, TrueNAS 26 is the release where the lines between them got harder to draw than ever.