Open Source Unraid Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Unraid.
The best open source alternative to Unraid is CasaOS. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Unraid alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Unraid is Cosmos Server.
Unraid alternatives are mainly Server & VM Management. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Unraid.
Home server operating layer that turns a spare PC or single board computer into a personal cloud with one click apps.
CasaOS turns ordinary hardware into a personal cloud, giving files, media and self hosted services a home that demands no systems background from whoever uses it. The project began as the pre installed system for the crowdfunded ZimaBoard, after its team found no server system designed for home scenarios.
Installation is a single shell command run on a freshly installed Linux system, and from there everything is driven through a web interface rather than configuration files.
The feature set stays close to what a household actually needs.
- App store: one click installation of selected apps such as Nextcloud, HomeAssistant, AdGuard and Jellyfin.
- Docker ecosystem: over 100,000 apps from the wider Docker catalog can be installed alongside them.
- File and drive management: what you see is what you get, with no technical background required.
- Widgets: system and app widgets showing resource usage and app status at a glance.
- Hardware range: ZimaBoard, Intel NUC, Raspberry Pi, old computers and whatever else is available.
Builds cover amd64, arm64 and armv7. Debian 12 is tested and recommended, with Ubuntu Server 20.04 and Raspberry Pi OS also officially supported, while Elementary, Armbian, Alpine, OpenWrt and Arch Linux sit under community support, some of them not fully tested. Updates run from the settings screen or from a terminal session attached directly to the device.
A self-hosted server manager and secure gateway for home servers, NAS boxes and Raspberry Pis running containerized applications.
Cosmos sits in front of everything on your home server, acting as gateway and manager at once. It exists because self-hosted applications are so often vulnerable, and it starts from the assumption that the software you run cannot be trusted with direct exposure.
Install it on a server, a NAS or a Raspberry Pi, then reach Plex, Home Assistant, a blog or anything else through it. Applications stay vanilla Docker containers, so adopting an existing one means adding a URL in the interface, and leaving later costs nothing.
A single install covers most of what a home server otherwise needs assembled by hand.
- SmartShield: secures applications automatically, with anti-bot, anti-DDOS and TCP protection for FTP, SSH and game servers.
- Reverse proxy: routes to containers, other servers or static folders and single page apps, with automatic HTTPS.
- Authentication: multi-factor authentication, OpenID and forward headers, plus user management so friends and family get their own accounts.
- App store and containers: install, update and audit applications, with docker-compose import and terminal access preserved.
- Storage and backups: disk management with parity disks and MergerFS, network storage through RClone, and encrypted incremental backups using Restic.
- Monitoring and CRON: persistent real-time metrics with alerts, and scheduled tasks on the host or inside containers.
A built-in VPN reaches your applications from outside without opening router ports, and a customizable homepage collects them in one view. The design is modular, so you can run only the parts you want, skipping Docker, databases or HTTPS when your setup calls for it.
