StarWind Virtual SAN vs TrueNAS
StarWind Virtual SAN
starwindsoftware.com
TrueNAS
truenas.comSide by side
| Figure | StarWind Virtual SAN | TrueNAS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 2 |
| Spec score · Storage Management Software | 8.4 (#3) | 8.3 (#4) |
| Company size | LinkedIn categorizes StarWind as a privately held software-development company with 201–500 employees. | LinkedIn lists iXsystems as a privately held company with 201–500 employees and headquarters in San Jose, California. |
| Documentation | The official help site provides installation, TCP/IP settings, server configuration, concepts, unattended setup and license-application guides. | The documentation hub covers stable and development versions, accepts community contributions, and publishes release notes, security advisories and API references. |
| Founded | 2003 | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Beverly, Massachusetts, USA | Campbell, California, USA |
| Licence | The commercial agreement grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable software licence and says StarWind source code is proprietary trade-secret material. | TrueNAS is open source with GPLv3 code for the Web UI, while the product also contains separately licensed open-source components and proprietary extensions. |
| Management | The product provides a Web Management Console and a StarWind Management Console for storage, licensing, pools, disks, users and LUN operations. | The platform provides a web UI, CLI, SNMP, syslog, reporting, and a TrueNAS API. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.7 out of 5 from 204 reviews | 4.8 out of 5 from 167 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.7 out of 5 from 437 ratings | 4.9 out of 5 from 324 reviews |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 9.5 out of 10 from 167 reviews and ratings | 9.1 out of 10 from 50 reviews |
| Security advisories | StarWind publishes advisories for component vulnerabilities; entries dated September 21, 2026 cover Mbed TLS, rsyslog and OpenZFS issues. | TrueNAS publishes security advisories and recommends configuring systems according to its security best practices guide. |
| What it does | StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage that replaces physical shared SAN hardware by pooling and mirroring internal disks and flash between virtualization hosts. | TrueNAS is a self-hosted storage platform built on OpenZFS for unified file, block, object and application workloads. |
Plans
StarWind Virtual SAN
- StarWind Virtual SAN FreeFree
- Virtual SAN FreeFree
- DatacenterPriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- StarWind Virtual SANPriced on request
In their own words
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is software designed to replace physical shared SAN storage in SMB, ROBO, and Edge environments. It provides fault tolerance and high availability starting with two nodes, and supports iSCSI, SMB3, NFS v4.1, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics, and iSER. Deployment options include Windows-native software in a Hyper-V partition or a Linux-based virtual machine on a chosen hypervisor. An HTML5 console is used to monitor and manage hardware and software resources. Listed reliability features include ZFS self-healing, AI-powered telemetry, and call-home systems. Supported hypervisor versions include VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 or later, Windows Server Hyper-V 2019 or later, oVirt/OLVM/RHV 4.4 or later, Proxmox VE 9.1 or later, and XCP-ng 8.3 or later. The free edition is self- or community-supported, and its comparison lists web UI support for KVM only; paid editions list KVM, Hyper-V, and ESXi. A 30-day trial is available, while paid pricing is on request.
TrueNAS
TrueNAS Community Edition is free storage software that provides file, block, and object storage through one interface. It uses ZFS capabilities including snapshots, replication, RAID-Z, and self-healing checksums. Listed services include SMB, NFS, iSCSI, S3 API compatibility, apps, Docker containers, and virtual machines. Administrators can manage it through a web UI or CLI and use SNMP, syslog, reporting, and the TrueNAS API. Security options include self-encrypted drives, dataset encryption, encrypted replication, WireGuard, OpenVPN, ACLs, and IP filtering. The maker lists integrations or certifications involving Kubernetes CSI, Proxmox, VMware, Veeam, Red Hat OpenShift, and others. The Community Edition is a free software download for x86 hardware, with support through forums, documentation, release notes, and bug ticketing. Professional support is described for Enterprise customers. TrueNAS publishes security advisories and recommends configuring systems according to its security best practices. Moving from TrueNAS CORE to Community Edition is a one-way upgrade.