FreeNAS vs Nasuni comparison

FreeNAS and Nasuni are both solutions in the NAS category. FreeNAS is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.0, while Nasuni is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.2. FreeNAS holds a 2.0% mindshare in N, compared to Nasuni’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of FreeNAS users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Nasuni users who would recommend it.

FreeNAS

Read 9 FreeNAS reviews

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352 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Nasuni

Read 36 Nasuni reviews

1,874 Views
404 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

FreeNAS

Nasuni

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Nasuni and FreeNAS compete in the enterprise file storage category. Nasuni seems to have the upper hand for large enterprises due to its scalability and cloud integration, while FreeNAS is preferred by small to medium-sized implementations for its flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Features:Nasuni offers a centralized management console, unlimited capacity, and continuous versioning. FreeNAS emphasizes strong integration with Linux or Windows environments, disk management, and container integration.

Room for Improvement:Nasuni could improve in areas like replication speed and monitoring capabilities, and users suggest better mobile access tools. FreeNAS needs enhanced documentation, better clustering features, and improved backup processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Nasuni supports hybrid and public cloud environments and is praised for responsive customer service. FreeNAS is user-friendly for on-premises deployment, but relies heavily on community support.

Pricing and ROI:Nasuni has pricing based on data usage per terabyte with annual licensing, advantageous for larger enterprises due to its cloud integration. FreeNAS is open-source with minimal costs, appealing to budget-conscious users with technical expertise.

To learn more, read our detailed FreeNAS vs. Nasuni Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

FreeNAS vs. Nasuni

June 2025

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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

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Nasuni

Ranking in NAS

6th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (1st), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (4th), Cloud Backup (15th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (10th), Cloud Storage Gateways (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of FreeNAS is 2.0%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 5.2%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NAS

Featured Reviews

Vincenzo D'Aniello

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.

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Barry Sunanan

Senior Architect - Data and Solutions at Wipro Limited

It helped us save 40 to 45 percent on some types of data

It can provide a 360-degree view of your data, depending on how you implement it and whether you're storing your data in Nasuni. However, if you're working with multiple cloud providers, I don't think it's mature enough to provide a 360-degree view of what's in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. I think it can do it, but it's still a lot of scope and range fitting. Given that Nasuni storage is actually cheaper in some areas, it made sense for us to move a lot of our data away from Microsoft. Nasuni gave us more of a 360 view of that particular data type. Other data types are a little different because the company went in a direction where they wanted to store some stuff in an AWS S3 bucket rather than a file storage system. An S3 bucket has its advantages, but if you were to store more of your data in Nasuni, you would get a wider 360-degree view of it rather than on several cloud providers. I have data in AWS, Google, and Azure, and I would like to see a wider view of all the data stored across these three top providers. Currently, I use it for AWS and Azure, but I couldn't use both of them at the same time. I think Nasuni could have better visibility across these different areas. I had to take my data out and then do some analysis to get the costs. It would be helpful to have more built-in analytics tools to compare the storage costs between the various cloud providers. I would also like some graphing capabilities. We had a tool called Grafana that we used for graphing. I think some more visual analytics like that would be nice.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has been very stable so far."

"It has the best storage capacity."

"It integrates well into either Windows or Linux environments."

"What I like about it is that I can work on it from any computer or any device. The initial setup is very simple. The setup wizard is really helpful."

"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."

"Its stability is the most valuable. It is reliable, and we don't have to worry too much about it."

"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 most important feature is that things are backed up automatically in AWS. We have a lot of remote sites where there is a tiny server onsite and, in a lot of cases, we really don't have to back them up because the data is automatically copied to AWS. The cloud replication is the most useful functionality for us."

"The Nasuni management dashboard is helpful because, on the administration side, I'm able to view all of the different filers that we have in the UK, rather than check each one of them individually."

"The biggest and most impressive thing for us is the operational recovery (OR) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities that Nasuni has. If a filer goes down, or an ESX server goes down, then we can quickly recover."

"The nice thing about Nasuni storage is that it is immutable. This means the data is only written once. So, you never modify the files. When you write a file out to the storage, it doesn't modify it when you change it. The technology knows how to figure out what the difference is between the original file write and what the changes are. Therefore, it only saves the changes."

"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery. We can fully recover a site in two hours."

"With Nasuni Management Console (NMC), we get a single, centralized view of our entire internal structure and data center structure. This is very important because this caters to remote locations. One of the main care center teams is dependent on this solution. As it is directly connected to customers for the calls that they receive and troubleshoot, they can then help customers out in case they are not able to place an order."

"Nasuni has the capability of taking a snapshot every five minutes. If a user has accidentally deleted their data, we can recover it from the snapshot and provide the latest data to the user. It's a really great feature, one that is not provided by other vendors."

"The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud."

More Nasuni pros

Cons

"The support for S3 needs to be improved."

"The latest version of the dashboard doesn't work as good as the previous version."

"If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented."

"The one thing that I find difficult to do which is very time-consuming is that I like to have a backup of the important files."

"FreeNAS should be better prepared for clustering."

"They can improve the integration with PSA systems. This functionality could be better."

"They should include clustering for the solution."

"When we have to rebuild a filer or put a new one at a site, one of the things that I would like to be able to do is just repoint the data from Azure to it. As it is now, you need to copy it using a method like Robocopy."

"We forecasted that the data at my client's organization would grow by about ten percent annually, but we are migrating more data because we are bringing in some servers that had not previously been within the scope of our license. We expected it would take us two years to reach a specific amount of data, but we hit that mark in one year. The licensing cost skyrocketed, so we need to renegotiate. It puts us in a bind because we are reliant on Nasuni for our service strategy. We can't deny our customers, but we also struggle to pay for that."

"Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy."

"Nasuni provides enough reporting to see what's happening. You can see the number of shares, total volume, issues, conflicts, etc., but it doesn't provide much visibility from a content perspective. For example, it doesn't tell you the data age. When you're trying to sort and filter information, the data creation date is a critical factor. Nasuni doesn't give you that. You can't get a count of all the file types, like the number of PDFs, Word docs, and PPT files."

"When users from one office save their changes, their peers in another office can see the changes within minutes. Of course, this is an area for constant improvement and we hope that they can still reduce the amount of time it takes to replicate changes."

"The performance of the filesystem could be improved."

"The privilege settings need to be more granular, and alerts are an excellent example. If a user doesn't have access to them, they can't see them and access information such as what they may have done wrong, what's there, and when the last sync happened. However, the ability to view alerts also comes with permission to delete them, which is not good, so we need more customization options here."

"The performance monitoring could be improved."

More Nasuni cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For our configuration, we pay a little bit less than €10,000 ($12,000 USD) per year."

"We use the free version of the program."

"Its licensing cost is based on the hardware capacity."

"Its price is okay. It suits our needs."

"The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD 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."

"Its price is fair and reasonable. I don't have anything negative about its pricing and licensing. For us, there is also the cost of monitoring. We are monitoring through Xenos and not through Nasuni. That is another cost for us from the monitoring perspective, but as far as Nasuni goes, we don't have any other cost apart from the licensing fee."

"The pricing is on par with everybody else, and fair."

"There are cheaper forms of storage, but Nasuni is fairly priced for the functionality it offers. I can get basic file shares provisioned in Azure and pay for the storage and the CPU. The overall cost would be much less than Nasuni, but I would need to build the management console and encryption process, so it would cost a lot to develop that kind of functionality."

"Our agreement is set up such that we pay annually per terabyte, and we buy a chunk of it at a time. Then if we run out of space, we go back to them and buy another chunk."

"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."

"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."

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Performing Arts

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FreeNAS?

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FreeNAS?

The core version is free and open-source.

See all answers

What needs improvement with FreeNAS?

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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 ...

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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...

See all answers

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 ...

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FreeNAS

June 2025

Download FreeNAS product report

Buyer's Guide

Nasuni

June 2025

Download Nasuni product report

Overview

FreeNAS is an operating system that can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share data over a network. FreeNAS is the simplest way to create a centralized and easily accessible place for your data. Use FreeNAS with ZFS to protect, store, backup, all of your data. FreeNAS is used everywhere, for the home, small business, and the enterprise.

FreeNAS

Nasuni is a file data services enterprise focused on assisting firms with their digital transformation, global expansion, and information awareness. The Nasuni File Data Platform is a suite of cloud-based services designed to enhance user productivity, ensure business continuity, provide data intelligence, offer cloud options, and simplify global infrastructure. This platform and its auxiliary services are projected to replace conventional file infrastructure such as network attached storage (NAS), backup, and Disaster Recovery (DR), with an expandable cloud-scale solution. By storing file data in scalable cloud object storage from multiple providers, Nasuni positions itself as a cloud-native alternative for traditional NAS and file server infrastructure. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Nasuni serves sectors like manufacturing, construction, technology, oil and gas, financial services, and public sector worldwide, offering its services in more than 70 countries.

Reviews from Real Users

James J., IT Manager at a marketing services firm, says Nasuni’s management dashboard is helpful because he's able to view all of the different filers at once rather than check each one of them individually. He values the software’s security, reliability, good performance, helpful alerting, and responsive support.

According to a Server Engineering Services Lead at a mining and metals company, Nasuni offers good OR and DR capabilities, performs well, offers data security, and continuous file versioning helps recover from hardware failures.

The Managing Director of IT at a construction company appreciates Nasuni because it eliminates a lot of work that was previously done when managing backing up and restoring data files.

Nasuni

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

Buyer's Guide

FreeNAS vs. Nasuni

June 2025

Free Report: FreeNAS vs. Nasuni

Find out what your peers are saying about FreeNAS vs. Nasuni and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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