Proxmox, TrueNAS and OpenMediaVault are all free for home use. Unraid is the exception: it is proprietary software with a paid licence, which surprises people who assumed everything in this corner of computing is free.
Whether that is worth paying for is a real question, and the answer depends mostly on one number.
The three tiers
Unraid sells perpetual licences, meaning you pay once rather than subscribing. As listed on Unraid’s pricing page on 21 September 2026:
| Tier | Price | Storage devices | Updates included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 | Up to 6 | 1 year |
| Unleashed | $109 | Unlimited | 1 year |
| Lifetime | $249 | Unlimited | For life |
There is a 30-day free trial, with no card required. That is worth using properly: build the whole thing on the trial and only buy once you know it suits you.
Prices are in US dollars on Unraid’s own page. What you pay in pounds depends on the exchange rate on the day, so treat the figures above as the reference and your card statement as the final word.
The one limit that decides it
The gap between Starter and Unleashed is the number of storage devices. Starter stops at six. Unleashed and Lifetime have no limit.
This is where people buy the wrong tier. It is easy to count the drives you have today and pick Starter. But a home server tends to grow, and the drives you add later count towards the same limit. Six sounds generous until you have four data drives, a parity drive and a cache drive, which is a perfectly ordinary setup and already hits the ceiling.
If you can realistically see yourself going past six devices, buy Unleashed from the start. Check the pricing page for the current upgrade terms before you settle on Starter, because the cheapest licence is only the cheapest if you never outgrow it.
Unleashed or Lifetime
These two have the same device limit. The only difference is updates.
Unleashed includes one year of updates. After that the software keeps working, but new releases stop arriving unless you pay to extend.
Lifetime includes updates for as long as the product exists, for $140 more.
The honest way to think about it: Lifetime is a bet that you will still be running Unraid in a few years. If you are confident, it is the cheaper route over time. If you are trying Unraid to see whether the hobby sticks, Unleashed is the lower-risk way to find out.
Why pay at all, when the others are free
Unraid’s particular strength, in its own words, is that it supports different drive sizes, so you can mix drives of different sizes and add new ones one at a time as you need them, without reorganising the data already there. One or two parity drives protect everything else in the array. For someone building up a collection gradually, buying drives whenever they are on offer, that flexibility is the reason to choose it.
It is worth knowing that this advantage is narrower than it used to be, and most comparisons have not caught up. The storage system behind TrueNAS and Proxmox, ZFS, was long criticised for being hard to grow a disk at a time. Version 2.3.3 added support for adding new devices to existing RAIDZ pools without downtime, which closes part of that gap. Mixing drives of very different sizes is still the feature Unraid leads with, so if that is what you need, check it against the current release of whichever free system you are weighing it against rather than trusting an older comparison.
If you are buying all your drives at once and they are all the same size, the advantage largely disappears, and one of the free systems will serve you just as well.
What it runs on
Unraid describes itself as running on nearly any 64-bit x86 system. It does not publish a minimum memory or disk figure that we could find, so we have not invented one.
The current stable release is 7.3.2, from the 7.3.2 release notes. A 7.3.3 release candidate and a 7.4 beta were also available on the check date, but neither is the version to run on a machine holding things you care about.