Tom K.
Easy to Start, Powerful Enough to Stay
When I decided to really start my homelab journey in spring 2025 — not counting the ten years before that with first a Synology NAS and later a QNAP — I didn't have much experience with Docker containers or hosting essential services myself. Unraid was one of the platforms I discovered shortly before my new NAS arrived, and it immediately appealed to me. Even the website made a good first impression: clear, well structured, and easy to understand. I also really liked the idea of buying a lifetime license instead of adding yet another subscription to the list. What I probably appreciate most today, though, is the community. The support is great, there is an enormous amount of useful information on YouTube and in the forums, and there is a very friendly atmosphere around Unraid. If you run into a problem, chances are somebody has already solved it — and people are genuinely willing to help each other. I also really like the story behind Unraid. It started as a solution to a very practical personal problem: how to combine a collection of existing hard drives into one useful array. Even today, Unraid still feels much more like a product created by people who actually use and care about it than something designed by a huge anonymous corporation. With everything I have learned since spring 2025, would I perhaps consider something like Proxmox if I were starting from scratch today? Maybe. Or maybe I would still choose Unraid. What I do know is that I feel very much at home with Unraid. It gave me an approachable way into self-hosting, Docker and homelabbing, while still leaving me plenty of room to learn, experiment and expand. And whenever something goes wrong, there is a community around it where people help each other. For me, that counts for a lot.