If you've ever run a homelab, chances are you've tried Proxmox. Its mix of open-source accessibility, strong VM support, and lightweight containers has made it popular among enthusiasts and small IT teams alike. Beyond hobby projects, Proxmox has also found adoption in organizations that value cost efficiency or wanted to avoid locking themselves into VMware's catalog.

That adoption has seen some positive movement in the wake of Broadcom's changes to VMware's licensing and support model. For many, Proxmox represents a stable, affordable alternative that offers a sizable amount of virtualization and clustering capabilities before hitting scale.

But Proxmox is, at its core, a self-managed toolkit for infrastructure. It excels when you need to spin up VMs on bare metal or experiment with containers, but it leaves orchestration, automation, and cross-environment consistency in the hands of operators. This is where Cycle enters the conversation. Cycle begins with a similar foundation, but layers on container orchestration, automated networking and updates, and a fully managed control plane that spans on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.

In this post, we'll explore how Proxmox and Cycle compare across infrastructure, networking, operations, and governance, as well as why the decision often comes down to whether you want infrastructure as a toolkit, or infrastructure as a platform. Throughout the article we'll be building a progressive table that recaptures the main differences set forth in each section and allows you to see how the two softwares compare over the course of different subjects.

Deployment Model and Scope

Proxmox is a classic self-hosted setup. You install it directly on bare metal, and from there you are in full control. Virtual machines, lightweight containers, clustering, it is all in your hands. That level of control is exactly why Proxmox is so popular in homelabs and with smaller IT teams. The tradeoff is that its world is mostly on-premise or colocated environments. If your infrastructure lives in a single rack or datacenter, Proxmox feels right at home.

Cycle takes a different approach. Instead of being just something you install, Cycle gives you a control plane that spans across on-prem, colocation, and cloud providers. It is still your hardware, but now it plugs into a platform that handles orchestration and updates for you. Because the control plane is federated and automatically updated, you spend less time maintaining the plumbing and more time actually running workloads.

The difference shows up when you look at scale. Proxmox is great if your world is one site and you are comfortable owning the whole stack yourself. Cycle becomes compelling once you start spreading workloads across multiple environments and need a consistent way to manage them without doubling your operational overhead.

Infrastructure and Workload Support

Proxmox has been known in the virtualization space for quite some time. It is built on KVM, so virtual machines are first-class citizens. It also has support for Linux containers (LXC), which are lightweight and efficient, though not quite as flexible as full VMs or modern container runtimes. For home labs, smaller teams, or just single racks… that combination is plenty. You can virtualize hardware, run containers where it makes sense, and cluster a handful of nodes together.

Cycle starts from the same foundation but goes further. You can create and manage virtual machines, just like with Proxmox, but you also get full container orchestration as part of the platform. Containers are not just supported, they are scheduled, networked, and managed automatically. On top of that, Cycle has been experimenting with functions, giving teams a taste of serverless-style workloads alongside VMs and containers.

The takeaway is pretty clear. Proxmox gives you a reliable virtualization stack with some lightweight container support. Cycle builds on that idea and turns it into a flexible platform where different workload types can run side by side, all within the same system and with orchestration built in.

Networking and Storage

Proxmox networking is almost entirely manual. You are responsible for setting up bridges, VLANs, and firewall rules, and if you want something more advanced like software-defined networking, you have to bolt it on yourself. That level of control is powerful, but it also requires expertise and ongoing upkeep.

Cycle takes a more standardized path. Networking is automated and standardized. Servers and workloads connect to each other consistently without dealing with piles of manual configurations. Cycle also includes full DNS tooling, which means you can manage domains, load balancing / advanced routing, and service discovery directly inside the platform. For teams that want more control, Cycle supports both layer 2 and layer 3 networking, with layer 3 designed to be simple to implement and layer 2 available for those that need deep granular control.

Storage tells a similar story.

With Proxmox you configure your own volumes, whether local storage or distributed systems like Ceph. It works, but you own the complexity.

Cycle handles storage automatically allowing for pool and volume level storage as well as attachable block storage for virtual machines. Soon, Cycle will release native support for network storage (SANs), bringing the platform even deeper into talks with organizations that have big data needs.

Operations and Automation

Running Proxmox means taking full ownership of your environment. Upgrades are a manual process, and if you want load balancing you will need to bolt on external solutions. Terraform support is available, but most of the lifecycle management and infrastructure as code practices are up to you to implement. Monitoring exists, though it is fairly basic and often paired with outside tools to provide the kind of observability modern teams expect.

Cycle provides automatic platform updates. This includes the control plane itself and all your hub's worker nodes. Oftentimes, this frees teams from patching and chasing downtime windows. Load balancing is built in and offers a working out of the box solution or a path toward deep, granular control. Infrastructure as code comes in the form of Cycle Stacks, which use JSON or YAML to define environments in a consistent way. Monitoring and service discovery are not afterthoughts, they are integrated directly into the platform.

Proxmox leaves operators with the responsibility of building out all of these systems by hand. Cycle automates the heavy lifting so operators can spend more of their time on scaling, improving workflows, and supporting developers rather than babysitting the basics.

Governance and Multi-Tenancy

Proxmox offers the basics when it comes to governance. Role-based access control is there, and you can carve out permissions for different users or teams. Multi-tenancy is possible, but it is fairly limited, and most organizations end up layering their own policies and processes on top to get the level of separation they need.

Cycle is designed with multi-team environments in mind. The platform supports strong multi-tenancy, built around the concepts of environments, clusters, and namespaces. That structure allows teams to work in parallel while keeping workloads isolated and permissions clear. Access control is more than just user roles, it extends into how infrastructure itself is organized and shared.

For small teams, Proxmox's approach is usually enough. But for organizations that are growing, or that need to support multiple teams working across different environments, Cycle provides a framework that scales more naturally and avoids the need to bolt on governance later.

Wrapping Up

Proxmox has earned its reputation as a cost-effective toolkit for virtualization and containers. It gives teams the ability to run VMs and lightweight workloads on bare metal with full control over every part of the stack. For homelabs, smaller IT teams, and organizations that prefer to manage everything in-house, that approach can work.

Cycle offers an opinionated path, starting with the same foundation but expands it into a platform. Automation, orchestration, networking, monitoring, and governance are built in, and the federated control plane means these capabilities scale across on-prem, colocation, and cloud environments without additional overhead. The result is less time spent patching and wiring things together, and more time focusing on running and evolving applications.

The decision between the two often comes down to philosophy. If you want infrastructure as a toolkit and you are comfortable owning the details, Proxmox is a great choice. If you want infrastructure as a platform that abstracts the heavy lifting and grows with you, Cycle is built to take you there.