Umbrel vs CasaOS

For most self-hosters in 2026, Umbrel is the better choice, and the reason is maintenance rather than features. Umbrel shipped 1.7.4 in July 2026; CasaOS has not tagged a release since v0.4.15 in December 2024 and its last commit landed in August 2025, while IceWhale moved its attention to ZimaOS. CasaOS still wins on licensing: it is Apache 2.0, genuinely open source, whereas Umbrel is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. If a permissive license is your hard requirement, CasaOS is the honest pick. For everyone else, an actively maintained OS matters more.

Not actively. The CasaOS GitHub repository is not archived and still collects issues, but its last tagged release is v0.4.15 from December 2024 and its most recent commit is from August 2025. IceWhale Tech, the company behind it, now presents ZimaOS as the next generation of the project. CasaOS still installs and runs, and its Apache 2.0 license means anyone can fork it, but you should not expect new features or timely security patches from upstream.

Umbrel is a complete operating system you flash or install on a machine, with its own curated app store, Tailscale built in, and first-party hardware (Umbrel Home and Umbrel Pro). CasaOS is a layer you install on top of an existing Linux with a single shell command, turning Debian, Ubuntu Server or Raspberry Pi OS into a Docker-based personal cloud with a file manager and widgets. That difference drives everything else: CasaOS is more flexible about what it runs on and leaves the base system to you, while Umbrel owns the whole stack and is easier to get right.

Not as a built-in, first-party integration the way Umbrel does. Umbrel ships Tailscale inside the OS, so remote access works without port forwarding and without exposing anything to the internet. On CasaOS you install Tailscale yourself on the underlying Linux, or run it as a container, which works but is a manual step you own and maintain.

It depends on what you count. CasaOS advertises a curated store plus access to the wider Docker ecosystem, which it describes as over 100,000 apps: in practice that is Docker Hub, reachable from any Docker host. Umbrel has a smaller curated catalog, hundreds of apps across the official store and Community App Stores, but each one is packaged and tested for Umbrel rather than being a raw container you configure yourself. Curation is the real difference, not the headline number.

Yes, by running Bitcoin Core in Docker like any other container, but you do the wiring yourself: storage, pruning, RPC credentials, and the wallet or Electrum server you point at it. Umbrel packages Bitcoin Core, a Lightning node, mempool, Electrum servers and BTCPay Server as one-click apps that already know how to talk to each other. If running a node is the reason you want a home server, that packaging is the whole difference. See our Umbrel vs Start9 comparison for the two node-focused platforms head to head.