HomeioZimaOS replaces your operating system with a managed, read-only NAS system. That is a fair trade on a dedicated x86 box full of drives, and a frustrating one the day you need a package it does not ship or want to run it on a Raspberry Pi. Homeio installs on Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS and leaves the system under it alone.
| Need | In Homeio |
|---|---|
| Hardware | Any 64-bit machine running Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS, x86_64 or ARM64. ZimaOS: x86-64 machines with UEFI, Zima hardware or not. |
| The system underneath | Your normal Linux, with apt, SSH, cron and anything else you run. ZimaOS is read-only and managed; SSH and a web terminal sit behind Developer Mode. |
| Drive redundancy | No RAID manager. Partition, format and mount disks; use mdadm or ZFS yourself if you need redundancy. ZimaOS: RAID 0, 1, 5 and 6, with ZFS as an option. ZimaOS is ahead. |
| Accounts | One account with TOTP two-factor. Multi-user with roles is planned for 2.0. ZimaOS: several accounts with per-user Samba permissions, 3 on the free edition. |
| Sharing folders | Share folders over Samba and mount SMB shares from other machines. ZimaOS: SMB with a GUI, NFS and iSCSI from the command line. |
| Backups | A weekly archive of the database, /DATA and your stacks, seven kept, on the same disk. Copy it off. ZimaOS runs backup jobs from cloud, USB, network or internal sources to one or two destinations. |
| Remote access | Tailscale for you; Cloudflare Tunnel for an app you share on your own domain. ZimaOS: ZimaClient, an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. |
| Recurring jobs | Cron-scheduled app restarts, image pulls, backups and scripts, with a notification on failure. |
| Cost | Free, AGPL-3.0, no limits. ZimaOS: free up to 4 disks and 3 users; Plus is a one-time $29 per device. |
For some setups. ZimaOS is IceWhale's NAS operating system, the successor to CasaOS's direction: it replaces the OS on an x86-64 machine and keeps the system read-only and managed. Homeio installs on a normal Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS system and leaves that system yours. If you want RAID and family accounts on a dedicated NAS, ZimaOS is the better fit; if you want to keep your Linux and manage apps, files and disks on it, Homeio is.
Storage and people. ZimaOS sets up RAID 0, 1, 5 and 6 from the interface, with ZFS as an option, gives each family member an account with their own Samba permissions, runs backup jobs to one or two destinations, connects Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive, and offers peer-to-peer remote access through ZimaClient. Homeio has no RAID manager and one account.
It runs on hardware ZimaOS does not support, including the Raspberry Pi and other ARM64 boards, and it leaves the operating system open: apt, SSH, cron and your own services keep working. It also has a cron scheduler for commands, scripts, app restarts, image pulls and backups, Cloudflare Tunnel for publishing an app on your own domain, and no disk or user limits because there is no paid tier.
The free edition covers the core features for up to 4 disks and 3 users. ZimaOS Plus lifts both limits for a one-time $29, bound to one device, and is included with IceWhale's ZimaBoard, ZimaBlade and ZimaCube. Homeio is open source under the AGPL-3.0, with no paid tier and no limits.
No. Homeio installs on Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS as systemd services behind Nginx, or as containers with Docker Compose. The operating system stays yours. The flip side is that updates to the OS are your job, where ZimaOS updates the whole system as one image.
Yes. Homeio's default catalogue is the official CasaOS app store, it reads the same x-casaos Compose metadata, and it keeps app data in /DATA/AppData like CasaOS. You can add other CasaOS-format stores from a ZIP URL, or paste any Compose file.
Yes, with a fresh install, since Homeio needs a normal Linux underneath. Copy your app data and files to another disk, install Debian or Ubuntu and then Homeio, reinstall your apps from the store or as custom Compose apps pointing at the copied data, and copy your files back. If the data sits on a ZimaOS RAID array, make sure you can read it outside ZimaOS before you wipe anything.
Choose ZimaOS for a dedicated x86 NAS with several drives, especially on Zima hardware, or when several people need their own accounts. Choose Homeio for a Raspberry Pi, for a machine that already runs Linux and other services, or when you want scheduled tasks, Cloudflare Tunnel and an open-source licence without limits.
curl -fsSL https://get.homeio.app | sudo bash on Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS, which serves the UI on port 80, or docker compose up -d from a clone of the repository, which serves it on 12026. The first account you create is the only one.
The demo needs no install. On a spare machine or a VM, the Docker install takes a few minutes and listens on port 12026, so it does not fight your current setup for port 80.