I ran the free edition of ESXi at home for a couple of years and it was fine. Solid, even. But I moved the box to Proxmox a few weekends ago and I'm not going back, so here's the honest why.
The free ESXi licence was always the quiet friction. No API worth the name without paying, the web client lagging behind, and the persistent sense that I was a guest in someone else's product, tolerated rather than served. Nothing fatal, just a hundred small reminders that the free tier exists to upsell me.
Proxmox flips that. It's Debian underneath, which means when something breaks I'm in a Linux box I understand rather than an appliance I'm meant to leave alone. It does full VMs and LXC containers in the same interface, and being able to run lightweight containers next to proper VMs on one host turned out to suit a homelab perfectly. And ZFS is built in, so my storage story and my hypervisor story finally live in the same place.
The migration itself was the usual evening of exporting, fiddling with disk formats, and swearing gently at network bridges. By midnight everything was back up, this time on a platform where ssh into the host is encouraged rather than frowned upon.
I'll say the obvious thing: ESXi free is a perfectly reasonable choice and plenty of people run happy labs on it. For me, wanting LXC, ZFS and a host I'm allowed to poke at made Proxmox the clear pick. Boring, capable, and mine to break.