iXSystems has two current and distinct TrueNAS products each of which has several supported versions:
TrueNAS CORE is built on top of FreeBSD and grew from FreeNAS, which dates back to about 2011. In addition to developing TrueNAS, iXSystems has contributed heavily to the development of FreeBSD and OpenZFS. Even Gomez, who has been around for a couple of centuries, and who has seen presidents and even countries come and go, is impressed with this pedigree.
TrueNAS SCALE is essentially the same functionality but migrated to Debian Linux and saw its first release in early 2022. The change of technology base and ongoing development has resulted in some significant divergence between the two products at a very detailed level, but at a high level they have pretty similar functionality.
In general terms we currently recommend (as does iXSystems) that you install TrueNAS SCALE rather than CORE:
If you choose SCALE, then we recommend that you install the Dragonfish 24.04 version of TrueNAS SCALE rather than Cobia 23.10:
If you're reading this at a later date, our general recommendation is that you install the current release, once it's had a couple of point releases. Thus, if the current version is 24.10.0, you may want to install the latest release of 24.04 instead. But if the current version is 24.10.2, the major bugs have likely been worked out and it's probably safe to install.
Both SCALE and CORE support:
TrueNAS CORE is different from SCALE in the following respects:
| CORE | SCALE | Differences |
| File sharing | CORE is marginally more mature and stable for basic file sharing functionality, but this gap is narrowing quickly. | |
| Jails | Apps Linux Jails |
CORE Jails: Light weight FreeBSD containers into which you can install pretty much any FreeBSD-compatible software you like. SCALE Apps: Kubernetes containers, with c. 100 provided by ixSystems and c. 800 more by TrueCharts. ixSystems has indicated that in ElectricEel they will drop Kubernetes in favour of a simpler Docker-based capability and have promised that TrueNAS Charts will have Docker equivalents. SCALE Jails: Dragonfish 24.04, SCALE also provides unofficial/unsupported support for “Linux jails,” which function similarly to the FreeBSD jails described above - however the CORE Jail Wizard UI is not provided but rather a community provided command line script can assist with setup. |
| Plugins | CORE Plugins: Although the feature still exists, it is no longer supported. We recommend that you DO NOT USE TrueNAS CORE plugins UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. | |
| bhyve | KVM |
CORE bhyve: Reported to have more limited compatibility with guest operating systems than some other hypervisor technologies. SCALE KVM: Very compatible and reliable |
In the interests of fairness - and because we are enthusiastic users rather than iXsystems employees - we would like to mention alternatives to TrueNAS and indicate (without being experts in these alternatives) how they differ from TrueNAS:
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