No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

FreeNAS vs Nasuni comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

FreeNAS
Ranking in NAS
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nasuni
Ranking in NAS
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), Cloud Migration (6th), Cloud Storage (14th), Cloud Backup (35th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (19th), Cloud Storage Gateways (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of FreeNAS is 3.7%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 4.1%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nasuni4.1%
FreeNAS3.7%
Other92.2%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Vincenzo D'Aniello - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at TREXON S.R.L.
Open-source with great disk management and task synchronization
The system itself allows you to add any feature. The only bad thing is that this maybe depends on FreeBSD, and sometimes finding documentation is difficult. For example, we knew that previous versions automatically enabled the Linux kernel, yet with the recent version, this was no longer the case. Now, there was the possibility of being able to create Debian-based jails, and finding the documentation was not easy or fast. That said, in the end, we succeeded. If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented.
reviewer1822371 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Cloud data management that achieves cost efficiency with advanced data protection features
I am currently using Nasuni for seismic data. We have a huge data size, and we want to reduce costs. Nasuni acts as a caching solution, so we put some data into the cache, and the rest goes to the blob, which helps us save on costs. We use it for applications like Petrol and Tech Log, where 3D…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The program is fast, fun to work on and easy."
"The fact that no data are lost when a hard drive fails is extremely reassuring, as I have had two of five drives fail at one time and no data were lost."
"The ease of use of the 'jail', the management of backups, and copies to easily create test and pre-production scenarios have speeded up the development and distribution of business apps."
"It has the best storage capacity."
"It integrates well into either Windows or Linux environments."
"The solution has been very stable so far."
"After using FreeNAS I will never spend money for commercial products like Dell or 3Par."
"FreeNAS is much simpler and easier to use than other solutions, but we don't have the complete range of features that come with the full version."
"The snapshot functionality and the unified file system are definitely the most valuable features for us. The UFS allows everybody across the organization to see the exact same data at the same time, instead of having different file servers with different structures on them, and that's mission-critical. We have different branches throughout our organization that have to act on that data."
"We like Nasuni's snapshot technology. The snapshot and recovery features are the things we use most frequently. Ideally, I would recommend NFS or CFS, which gives you more benefits for clients or anyone who wants to access FTP protocol, FTP utilities, SAN, and MSS."
"We have absolutely seen an ROI, and we are super happy with our ROI."
"The global file locking feature is valuable. The ability to quickly deploy new sites is also valuable."
"It has the ability to do end-user recovery, or a user can simply contact an admin who can perform a recovery from the management console. The versioning has simplified everything. Now we don't have to worry about those components."
"With a shift to more remote work during this past year, we deployed a new instance of Nasuni in Azure, which allowed us to be more flexible and support remote work better, something we wouldn't have been able to do with legacy file storage."
"The solution gives us a breakdown and summary of every resource and each volume within every resource. It tells us the code within a given volume, so I can go in there and look at the size of the files that are stored there. Nasuni gives me the big picture and allows me to connect things like Power BI to any endpoint. I can take that tabular information from Nasuni and look at it in a graph."
"The most valuable feature is the storage in that it only keeps the last-used data locally, while everything else is backed up to the cloud. That way, we never really have to worry about file space in each office or the replication to the other file servers for DR."
 

Cons

"Make it easier to find out how to fix things when something goes wrong."
"The latest version of the dashboard doesn't work as good as the previous version. Sometimes we change our dashboard back to the previous version because the latest version just doesn't work as good."
"One of my hard drives has failed and the documentation that I've been able to find has not helped."
"They should include clustering for the solution."
"Its support for Hyper-V clusters."
"They can improve the integration with PSA systems. This functionality could be better."
"FreeNAS should be better prepared for clustering."
"The support for S3 needs to be improved."
"When we first set up our bandwidth limiting, we had a few problems when it came to managing it. This is something that could be made easier; however, we were able to make the changes that we needed to for our environment."
"The only issue we face with Nasuni is from the performance perspective. Sometimes, when we deploy a Nasuni device, it doesn't meet our requirements. It's a capacity-planning issue."
"Its pricing can get a tad expensive."
"I would say that they need to make their technical support quicker."
"We've had some organizational changes that Nasuni has not been able to keep up with, mainly from a data or file system perspective. Moving a filer from one management console has been a challenge. It lacks the flexibility to move files in and out of the management console. We have six management consoles now, and we're constantly telling Nasuni, "Hey, please allow us to move a filer from management console A to B." They can't do that."
"There is some room for improvement when it comes to monitoring. We are not using Nasuni monitoring. We are using our own monitoring through Xenos. Nasuni can provide better monitoring capabilities for us to monitor all the filers and NMC so that we don't have to use a third-party tool."
"The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it."
"One area that we've recently spoken to Nasuni about is single sign-on. Another is integrating Nasuni with Azure Active Directory. In our particular case, that would allow for third-party consultants to access our Azure Active Directory environment as opposed to coming to our on-premises environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For our configuration, we pay a little bit less than €10,000 ($12,000 USD) per year."
"Its price is okay. It suits our needs."
"We use the free version of the program."
"Its licensing cost is based on the hardware capacity."
"There are annual costs that we pay for maintaining all of the snapshot history in the cloud. That is the primary cost that we pay. We occasionally buy newer Nasuni appliances or deploy them to new offices when the need occurs. That capital equipment expenses is less than the cost of buying new file storage systems. For the most part, you are trading a CapEx cost of storage equipment for an OpEx cost for management of all the snapshot data in the cloud."
"I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable."
"It is around $850 per terabyte per year. Any additional costs that you would incur are for the local caching devices that you'll need to access Nasuni. You kind of provide your own virtual machines or compute to access the data. You also pay for the object storage. So, there are three parts to it. There is the Nasuni license per terabyte. You would also pay for the actual object storage in the cloud, and then you would pay for virtual machines to access the storage."
"Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license."
"It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap."
"The cost of licensing is negotiated and billed annually per terabyte."
"With this solution, the license renewal is pretty swift. With the virtual appliance, you just need to take care of the OS versions and patches. In a way, we don't have to struggle much with renewals because the only thing that we need to take care of are the licenses. We renew it every three years. This aspect goes with infrastructural costs because it doesn't cost us too much to maintain the solution."
"They could lower the cost, but it saves so much money when you go into it (by losing all the backup)."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Performing Arts
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Does Nasuni have a good pricing model?
Based on the experience of my organization, Nasuni is definitely worth the money, since it gives you an all-in-one solution where you'd usually need several programs. About the cost, there isn't a ...
Is it easy to restore files with Nasuni?
As someone who has used this feature of Nasuni I can tell you - yes, it's good for file recovery and you'll definitely benefit from very quick times. I can't tell you if it's the best one because I...
What features and services does Nasuni offer?
Hi, if you pick Nasuni, you'll be benefiting from many services for a good price. Well, it's a personalized price you get after an agreement with the company but in my organization's case, it is a ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Morroni Technologies Inc., Creative Integrations
American Standard, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, E*TRADE, Ithaca Energy, McLaren Construction, Morton Salt, Movado, Urban Outfitters, Western Digital
Find out what your peers are saying about FreeNAS vs. Nasuni and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.