The topic Almost everyone self-hosts for the same 4 reasons, and HexOS covers all of them now is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Self-hosting has a bit of a reputation problem. Ask someone what they run on their home server and you might get an overwhelming picture: a media server here, a photo backup tool there, maybe a password manager, a smart home setup, a file sharing tool, and depending on what they’re running it all on, an earful about LXCs, virtual machines, and TrueNAS configurations. It works, more or less, but “cobbled together” might be a more apt description.
Here’s the thing, though: strip away all the technical language and that sprawl is mostly an illusion. Almost everyone self-hosting is doing the same small handful of categories. They want to stream the media they already own. They want off Google Photos and Google Drive. They want their files to stay in sync across their machines without a cloud company in the middle. And a lot of them want to run their smart home locally instead of handing it to someone else’s servers. That’s basically the whole playing field, and it can be divided into just four categories.
HexOS takes a different approach to that playing field than most NAS platforms. Instead of treating apps as things you figure out on your own, it curates them: one-click installs with storage, permissions, and networking handled for you. What began as just Plex and Immich when the curation program launched has grown to 31 curated apps and counting, with new batches dropping every few weeks.
As someone who used TrueNAS at the very start of their home lab journey and has been running HexOS in a Proxmox VM for over a year now, what struck me isn’t the size of the list. It’s how completely those 31 apps cover the four categories that actually matter. Here’s the current state of play, and how HexOS fills it in.
The first thing most people want out of a NAS is their own Netflix, and usually their own Spotify right behind it. This is the gateway category, and it’s the one that gets many people building a server in the first place. HexOS has both covered already.
Jellyfin is the media server I use all the time, and it sums up the entire pitch of HexOS. It’s fully open source, requires no account with anyone, and streams your media to any device in your house, or outside it if you set that up. No restrictions on what you can transcode, no paywall in front of features. It’s just your own media on your own hardware.
HexOS preconfigures many apps on install rather than dropping you into a setup wizard, and it’s a pretty nice change. Plex and Immich were the first apps to get the treatment, with the rest of the catalog following. On my own setup, installing the media server no longer means defining mount points and media folders before you’ve even seen a dashboard. You install it, you open it, and your media is already there.
That’s not how this normally goes on a fresh TrueNAS install. On plain TrueNAS you create datasets, set ACLs, mount storage into the container, and then walk through the media server’s own library wizard. It’s not impossible, and it’s how I’ve set up my own instance before, but for a newcomer it’s the difference between a one-minute job and an evening project. I’ve used Plex and Emby too, both of which are curated on HexOS now, but Jellyfin is the one I’ve settled on.
As well, music is one of those self-hosting categories people forget about until they realize Spotify is missing a few of the songs they’ve got on a CD or vinyl. Navidrome is a lightweight music server that indexes your collection and streams it to any browser or Subsonic-compatible app.
I run Navidrome for the same reason I run Jellyfin. I’ve got a local music library, and I want it from anywhere without uploading it to someone else’s servers first. The curated install creates the music dataset, sets permissions, and gets the server running. You point it at your music folder, and that’s more or less it. It’s one of the newer curated apps, and the fact that HexOS is bothering to curate something more niche tells you the platform isn’t stopping at the obvious picks.
This second category is the one that gets people seriously committed: getting their photos and files off Google. This is where self-hosting becomes something you treat seriously rather than just a hobby, and there are countless apps out there that can enable you to do exactly that.
Immich is one of those apps, and it was actually one of HexOS’s first two curated apps, arriving alongside Plex. I run Immich on my HexOS server and it backs up my photos from my phone automatically. The mobile app uploads in the background while the server processes and organizes everything, and the web interface is fast enough, and resembles Google Photos enough, that you don’t really feel like you’ve left Google’s ecosystem. Face detection, geolocation, and search are all here and working, just on your own hardware instead of someone else’s.
This is also the app that shows off preconfiguration best. On bare TrueNAS, Immich is one of the more involved things to set up, with a lot of install steps. HexOS handles the storage datasets and permissions and smart pathing for you, and gets it running in a couple of minutes. I’ve set up Immich in an LXC, on regular TrueNAS, and on HexOS, and even as someone comfortable doing it the hard way, I’m a big fan of the quick version, especially for an app that might be protecting years of photos.
On the file side, Nextcloud is the app most people picture when they hear “self-hosted cloud,” and for good reason. File storage, collaborative document editing, calendar, contacts, and a whole ecosystem of plugins, all running on your server instead of someone else’s.
I use it for the same things I used Google Drive for: sharing files, keeping documents synced across devices, and having one central place for everything I don’t want scattered across my machines. The desktop client syncs a folder just like Dropbox does, and the web interface is clean enough that non-technical people can use it without explanation. The curated install handles the storage configuration and gets it running with sensible defaults. You’ll still do the initial setup yourself, the admin account, trusted domains, maybe two-factor, but the server-side work that usually eats an afternoon of reading docs is already done.
Nextcloud is a big, complex app, and HexOS strips it down to the parts that actually need your input.
The third category is quieter and easy to overlook, but once you’ve got a few devices, it just might be the one you might end up using every day without thinking about it. HexOS covers both sides of it, too: the continuous, set-and-forget kind of sync, and the quick one-off transfer.
Syncthing is the quietest app on this list, but also, possibly, the most useful. It syncs folders between devices continuously, peer-to-peer, with no cloud service in the middle. Set it up once and your files stay in sync across every machine you own without you thinking about it.
I run it on my server to keep certain directories mirrored between my desktop, my laptop, and the NAS. The curated install gets the server running, and from there you pair it with the Syncthing clients on your other devices. Pick a folder, pick a peer, and it handles the rest, and it only takes like thirty seconds of setup per machine. Compared to Nextcloud it’s lighter and more focused, as it’s a file sync engine rather than a cloud suite, and it’s better at that one thing than anything else I’ve used.
PairDrop, on the other hand, is simple to the point of being almost boring, and that’s exactly why I love it. You simply open the web interface on two devices on the same network and you can send files between them, without an account or any setup required. It’s basically AirDrop for everything that isn’t an Apple device.
The curated install takes seconds, and once it’s running, any device on your network can reach it through a browser. I use it to move screenshots from my phone to my desktop, send documents to my laptop, and occasionally get a file onto a machine that doesn’t have a USB port handy. If you’re anything like me, you won’t even think about it until you need it, and then you’ll be glad it’s there. Configuring it on TrueNAS is easy enough too, but when it’s a single one-click install, it’s a lot easier to just make it a part of your workflow. That’s the whole point of the curation process here: you don’t have to want something badly to install it.
The fourth category is the one that really got me into self-hosting, and is the one that surprises me when I see other people don’t do it. You’re already running a server 24/7, so why not automate your smart home? I use Home Assistant, and it doesn’t cost you any extra hardware or even, really, more in electricity. It’s just another app on the machine that’s already running.
Home Assistant is the app that convinced me local smart home control wasn’t just viable, but that it was genuinely powerful. I’ve been running it for over a year, and it handles lights, sensors, automations, and my microcontrollers, all on my own network rather than through a cloud service.
The curated install is straightforward. Click install, wait a minute, and Home Assistant is running with its default configuration. You’ll set up your devices and automations from there, which is true of any Home Assistant install, but the server-side setup is handled. On TrueNAS, getting it running means configuring a VM or wrestling with the container app.
Home Assistant is far from the hardest setup of the bunch, to be fair, but it’s still a lot of work if all you want is your lights to come on at sunset. HexOS skips all of that, and it’s one of my favorite self-hosted apps out of everything I run.
I’d be lying if I said HexOS has everything, because it absolutely doesn’t. You probably noticed that out of the categories I listed, there are things you use your NAS for that fall outside of those. Password management is the obvious one, since there’s nothing like Vaultwarden in the one-click install list yet. Network-wide ad blocking and DNS is the other, with neither Pi-hole nor AdGuard Home available as a curated install.
However, the full TrueNAS catalog sits one click underneath HexOS, where Vaultwarden, AdGuard Home, Pi-hole, and plenty more are all available, and they even show up in the regular applications list. They’re not one-click curated installs, but they’re not hidden either, and the gap is just a few extra clicks. So the map has maybe two categories of uncurated applications, and both are still available when you strip back the HexOS layer. If you want to go even further, you can install Portainer or Dockge through the TrueNAS catalog and run arbitrary Docker containers.
HexOS isn’t the only platform doing one-click installs, and it isn’t even the biggest. Umbrel has a 300-app catalog and a gorgeous interface, CasaOS installs in a single line, and YunoHost runs hundreds of apps with built-in SSO. On raw app count, HexOS isn’t winning that race, but it also isn’t trying to. What none of them do is run that friendly app layer on storage you’d actually trust with your only copy of something. Umbrel, CasaOS, and the rest are Docker on plain Debian. HexOS is an orchestration layer on top of TrueNAS, which means ZFS underneath: snapshots, scrubs, checksummed data integrity, the storage backbone businesses have relied on for years. Everyone else’s one-click store is sitting on storage that doesn’t protect you the same way.
That’s the actual promise of HexOS, and it’s a better promise than those made by alternative applications. I don’t really care about HexOS having the most apps, but what I do care about is that it puts a genuinely approachable app experience on storage that won’t quietly lose your data. And almost nobody is doing both of those at the same time.