Ranking Synology's BEST Apps in 2024: Synology Tier List

23 thoughts on “Ranking Synology's BEST Apps in 2024: Synology Tier List”

• Excellent overview very useful thank you

• I very much appreciate the level of standard you are demanding. Some YouTubers would place every app two or more ranks higher up due to being too close to Synology to have the critical distance required to see room for improvement.

• I agree that HyperBackup is an excellent tool, providing multiple backup destinations, including several cloud options.

  However, what few seem to touch on, and why I don't use Hyper Backup for my NAS data to external drives, is how horribly slow it is for some reason. Even backing up to an external USB 3 device results in speeds of under 20 Mb/sec and often under 10!

  USB Copy, though not as sophisticated, allowed me to backup my NAS at close to the max transfer rate of the external device (circa 200Mb/sec), thus cutting days from my backup time.

  IfHyperBackup performed similarly, I'd use it for all my backups. At the moment, I only use it to backup a small shared folder with critical data direct to C2 storage.

• Honestly, I feel like Synology has basically abandoned much of their productivity software. As a home user, homeschooling our seven kids, I thought this would be a great alternative to the Google Drive universe. But Synology Office has been sitting with no significant updates for four years. When I bought my first Synology NAS, I thought the available cloud apps were not a bad first cut, and expected regular updates. For example, it is ridiculous that there is no way to set a default page size, such as 8.5×11 Letter for a document. Or widow and orphan control. Or even just a tiny bit more functionality in headers and footers. Only the most basic support exists. I could go on and on. I’m not sure why they would even bother, if they had no intention of making it a direct competitor to Google docs. I’m not even expecting an equal experience, but at least make a better attempt to provide a quality showing of the very basics.

• Yet another great video Frank! So, I’ve been thinking for a while now that my Microsoft Office 2016 will eventually no longer be supported. So, I either have to subscribe to Office 365 or buy the next release of Office 2025. Other than that I was considering Synology Office as an option. I’ve never installed or tried it, but am interested in where it might fall in your list? For clarity it would be for home use. Thanks again? 👍🏻

• I'm glad I see these applications in the same way. It's like Synology has the right idea but misses the mark either completely or in a lot of regards. They just need to do focus groups and listen to feedback to power users like yourself to make Synology "the choice" instead of "one of the choices" for Prosumer / power users.

• I use notestation. Works good but makes me nervous. I sent in feedback as I have had it overwrite and lose information when editing on two devices. The recommendation is to compare and pop up an option to keep a, keep b or merge. Hopefully this will be implemented soon.

• Regarding Synology Drive, is there a way to use it in place of Files app on the iPhone/iPad? I often save files there to edit between say my mac and ipad. I'd like to somehow replace iCloud functionality as that is expensive. Would be nice if I could also access it over the WAN, with like Cloudflare Zero Trust access/tunnel etc.

• Thanks for this great video! Enjoy watching it. 
  Virtual Machine Manager is in the top tier for me. I use it to run Proxmox Backup Server on the NAS via NFS. 2GB RAM only — I currently have a DS1522+ with 8GB of RAM. Runs great and backs up my proxmox cluster. It's the only VM I run and seems appropriate it's on the same server the data is stored on. Also I get snapshot replication of the VM as well as the PBS datastore — which I perform at the same time so I can rollback both of them together if I want everything to match perfectly.

• You forgot Synology Contacts and Synology Calendar, but I'll save you the trouble… They Suck! These might not actually be preinstalled apps but non the less. Thanks for all your vids!

• Great video. I found the comments about the Surveillance Station especially useful. I've been searching the internet for a long time for a good alternative that allows me to view the cameras with minimal lag and offers the possibility of managing them from my iPhone. Before hearing your comment about Blue Iris, I had already looked for information about this software, but nowhere explains it from the perspective of an amateur user wanting to switch from Synology.
  I don't mind if I have to buy a separate server and install Proxmox or Unraid. It would help me a lot to know how you have configured this software. It would be very helpful if you made a video about it.
  Greetings from Europe.

• I find Audio Station to be unintuitive and that's before getting to the app. Bubble UPnP is way better.

• The only comment I would add is that the mail server on Synology is top class bringing together all the pieces needed to match the big boys. But be prepared to make sure you have all the foundational components in place. Your own domain name, static IP from your ISP, good understanding of DNS records, and keeping up to date with new security features (domain key) when mail exchange happens. I have been running mail servers since I read the Linux bible which had used postfix, as mail exchange, and Squirrell mail as the IMAP mail client. My biggest challenge was making sure my IP was static and that the ISP did not block the all-important port 25. If you are comcast home user, you are pretty much out of luck inbound port 25 is blocked and even with a special request without a business account you can't unblock it. This is my 5th year with Synology mail server self-hosted at home and I have yet to have any issues with using it. For the average home user, I agree don't do it, if you are a home lab or tech enthusiast give it a shot.

• Great video as always and I don't disagree on anything you said. On that note. I do use Synology's mail server only not the way it was intended. I use it as a mail client that goes to my ISP's web mail and downloads my mail, as I hate webmail!! I do wish the full features of the server were available, "especially filtering and virus protection." I've left tons of feedback regarding this, as other users agree only to have it ignored.

• Backing up the Synology NAS : I'm not sure if this is on topic or not… My files are about 5% work files and 95% multimedia. I already backup my entire Synology NAS to 2 other NAS's ( both QNAP ). I also backup my work files to OneDrive. So, I think I'm well protected. What I would like to protect myself against is, if I completely lost the Synology NAS, I would like to be able to recover DSM, the apps, and all of the settings without doing a manual reinstallation. I do regularly backup the Synology configuration files through Control Panel. So, is there a way to just backup DSM and related stuff ? Would putting the data and media files on a separate volume help so that just DSM and related files could be backed up ?

• Most geek obsessed professionals just won't/can't give a pragmatic/terse/simple/big-picture answer to questions (even if you put a gun to their heads). Thks for keeping-it-simple/big-picture & staying out of the damned endless geek details.
  I got a DS734+ just for the home & been trying to get a keeping-it-simple/big-picture software ontology forever. ??Request you identify which apps should be off-loaded to other computers instead of on your synology NAS & why/how (ex: video transcoding)??

• Note Station? Just avoid. Joplin, Obsidian, Docmost… nearly anything other than this closed system, rarely developed, buggy piece of "I can do Evernote too" nonsense. Truth be told, Synology software is "good enough"… but world-class? leading-edge? fully-featured? desirable? Seldom.

• 👍👍👍👍👍

• Hey, great video. I have two Synology NAS . I use one as my main file/media storage and the other as the backup destination. Right now I use Active Backup for Business to backup the Storage NAS and 3 Windows PCs to the Backup NAS. Is there any advantage to switching to Hyper Backup?

• What do you think about Active Backup for Google Workspaces and Microsoft 365? I save all my writing and spreadsheets saved in My Documents folder which Synology Drive monitors in real time. I also have OneDrive on Cloud Sync and OneDrive on my main PC so my writing and spreadsheets are saved to OneDrive twice, once from my PC and once from my Synology. I don't know much about the active backup for Google and MS, so I'm wondering what am I at risk of losing by doing it my way instead of the Active Backup way?

• Excellent video! Very informative for users.

• Well-Done & Great Refernece

• Hey, dumb question from me: How do I copy a file from my NAS to an external hard drive, like a SanDisk 1TB Portable one? Internet isn't helping me. It basically locks up and say it cannot do it.

Comments are closed.