OP here. It’s less about Sylve doing something Proxmox can’t do, and more about a bunch of QoL improvements that come from us being heavy Proxmox users and building what we felt was missing.

A few concrete things:

ZFS-first UX: Not just "ZFS as storage”, but everything built around it. Snapshots, clones, ZVOLs, replication, all cleanly exposed in the UI without dropping to CLI.

Simple backups without extra infra: Any remote box with SSH + ZFS works. No need to deploy something like PBS just to get decent backups.

Built-in Samba shares: You can spin up and manage shares directly from the UI without having to manually configure services.

Magnet / torrent downloader baked in: Sounds small, but for homelab use it removes a whole extra container/VM people usually end up running.

Clustering: but not all-or-nothing, You can cluster nodes when you need it, and also disable/unwind it later. Proxmox clusters are much more rigid once set up.

Templates done right: Create a base VM/jail once and spin up N instances from it in one go, straight from the UI.

FreeBSD base: It's not really a benefit of Sylve, but rather the ecosystem that FreeBSD provides.. Tighter system integration, smaller surface area, no systemd, etc. (depending on what you care about)

None of this is to say Proxmox is bad, it’s great. This is more "we used it a lot, hit some friction points, and built something that feels smoother for our workflows."