 Tom here from Orange Systems and we're going to be comparing Synology versus TrueNAS. Now in the past, I did this on TrueNAS Core versus Synology, but here in February of 2023 with all the new features that have come and the maturity of the TrueNAS Scale project and the number of applications that are supported in it, I figured now is a good time to compare Synology versus TrueNAS Scale more specifically. I've talked about Scale versus Core and other videos, those will be linked down below. Now a few things I want to just close up front. We're resellers for both products, so I like both of them. I trust both of them in deployments and we use both of these in businesses. And of course, that will then bring up the question, which one do you use more of? And that's not as easy to answer because you can hire us for consulting on either one of the product lines, but we technically do more TrueNAS in the enterprise environments and more Synology in the small business environments. And more of the TrueNAS is TrueNAS Core going into something like a high availability setup for a hypervisor target for storage where we're talking like $100,000 of server equipment or more part of a larger infrastructure build. And while Synology is definitely catching up with some of their higher performing Synology units, they're not quite there at the highest end levels that we can get for TrueNAS, but when that small business need arises, especially for things like Surveillance Station, we definitely have a lot of Synology's out there as a NAS and a file sharing device and the active backup and the other tools we're going to talk about here. They're definitely a solid player in that market that we do a lot of and there's probably more small businesses than the enterprise $100,000 need. But hey, everything in between is different things we consult on regarding both of these NASs. And I want to share that experience and a whole lot of videos I have in a comparison chart I put together to try to get through the nuance of yes, these have features, but how those features are implemented on each of these devices is very different. So let's jump over to my forums where I have the chart. Now, this forum post is linked down below. And the first thing I want to cover that I didn't really add to this, but it may be because I thought it was obvious, but I just want to make sure this is clear TrueNAS scale and TrueNAS core can be downloaded and just built on whatever you want, provided the hardware supports it x86. They don't offer arm support at this time, but both of those are essentially can be DIY projects or from IX systems, you can buy custom hardware with support. So when I talk about the enterprise one and the high end systems that we do, they're often IX systems and they are supported and have support agreements from there, but you can do this on your own hardware. Synology is a combination of hardware and software integrated together on their system. There's not a way to official way to extract the Synology operating system and move it over to your own hardware on a DIY type of basis. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Now let's drill down a little bit deeper into the details and operating system. They're both Linux. But, and we're specifically talking about TrueNAS scale here. They're not both open source. So even though you have an open source base of Linux, TrueNAS scale is open source. The Synology is, well, no, not open source in terms of all the applications they have. Centralized management. This is external from TrueNAS is true command. True command is not an open source project. You use download and set up. It is a hostable project that you can use and product, I should say that you can use to centrally manage all of your TrueNAS systems and active insights is the equivalent from Synology. Both of these are paid options with licenses and based on the number of units you have or number of drives you have, I think is how they do true command. High availability. On IX systems hardware, you can, as I mentioned the M50, they have the TrueNAS core engineered to be able to do like a full HA with dual motherboards. And when it comes to the way they're doing it with TrueNAS scale in the future, and maybe you're watching this in the future where this exists, Gluster clusters will be a feature they have. So they're working on a lot of that, but it's not available right now, right here today for TrueNAS scale. It's something that's kind of built into the underlying operating system, but it's going to be available in the future versus Synology. And I have videos talking about HA clustering in Synology, the way it's supported, the way it works, the listed models. And Synology does have some models that have dual boards in them in terms of hardware and I've done reviews of those. But that's why I have a lot of video links here to dive into the nuances of how that works. External management via relay proxy. There's no availability with TrueNAS, but being that it's an open source project that doesn't require you to register with them. It kind of makes sense that they don't have anything that they're offering like that, but Synology does. And I think this is an important one, especially for home users stuck behind CGNAT, because how do you get to your things without having to go through some hoops and set things up? Well, you can just say, Hey, I want to be able to share this and we'll use a relay proxy. And yes, it's hosted by Synology, but that is an option they have without opening any ports. Hard drive support, SATA, SAS, MVME, and most common drives. You can use what you want when you're building it yourself. Of course, with your hardware, you can make all those choices when you're building a TrueNAS scale provided TrueNAS scale supports it and it's based on Debian. So yeah, there's a pretty wide variety of support varies by model. Some Synologies, especially the home user, small desktop models, don't have a problem doing this. But there are high end ones that have that not verified problem, which I have a video where I explain what that means in more detail. File systems supported, ZFS versus ButterFS or EXT4. Your two options for Synology. I'd recommend ButterFS, but if you have a need for EXT4, that's an option. Share types, NFS, SMB, iSCSI, WebDAV. You have the same types of share. So just from a pure let's share files standpoint, Synology does support that and so does TrueNAS. So there's pretty equivalency there. RAID supports a little bit more nuance though, because RAID Z, Z2, Z3, MIRS, and CFS Special BDAV types are all supported and I have a in-depth video where I talk about it and also links back to some forum post where there's even more details because there's a lot too and this is what makes CFS so amazing is all the extra cool features you get to really fine tune it to your environment. With your Synology, they run not ButterFS type RAID. So it's ButterFS, the file system, but they're still using their RAID and they have RAID 01560JBOD. They also have their special flash RAID that they offer with some models. So there's a lot on the Synology RAID types and there's some details there. So they are customizing the way they do RAID using the underlying Linux system. Expanding though, this is where once again saying yes, won't really give you the right answer because yes, you can expand ZFS, but how? Well, I've got a whole video on the how you expand ZFS. There's some rules to it, some very specific ones versus expanding drives and Synology is easier. So to say it's easier means I recommend you dive deeper into each of these because covering that in this video would be a long topic. That's why I've got separate links for diving deeper into it. Yes, you can do duplication on both. Brutalization support, they do have it. Now this is not gonna replace a more high-end hypervisor like XCPNG, ESXi or Proxmox. I know people may want to say, hey, can I use this instead of one of those other more developed, more fully featured hypervisors? I made a video on each of these. The true NAS virtualization is even more basic than the Synology. The Synology one's pretty good, but you're kind of in Synology's ecosystem with that and there's also when you go to some of the higher-end features, they have some licenses they charge for that. So I believe they're all one-time license fees, but that's information is in those videos that I dive deeper into. Docker support, yes, but not standard, yes, but not standard. So saying that they have Docker support doesn't mean you can just use any of the Docker features like if you built your own or set up your own Linux system and load a Docker on it. That is something I haven't really dove into any videos, either one of these, on doing the one-off Docker support. So saying it supports it is kind of yes, but take a look at how they support it and the not standard is a big thing on there. You can find people with tutorials on how to load a standard Docker image on there and that'll help dive in there. I just never done any of myself because I don't really use it that much outside of the native application they support. Native encryption, yes and yes as long as you're using the ButterFS and snapshot support, yes with ZFS and yes with ButterFS. I could have just put yes here, but specifically it's using the ZFS snapshots. There is no snapshotting if you format your Synology and there is no native encryption if you have your Synology sub to EXT4. Replication, yes to other ZFS targets such as Churnascale and Core. I have a video even, it's an older video, it's so relevant for how replication works with ZFS. ZFS replication is a feature of the file system that you're able to control through Churnas and ButterFS has this feature as well and they allow you to use it to other Synologies. You can technically from the command line probably replicate it to another system but Churnascore is generally gonna replicate best to another Churnas system or Churnascale, either one, you can go back and forth between Core and Scale for replication or from Scale to Scale from Core to Core but with Synology it's very much, I don't know any command line way maybe there is to do it but both of these are really ideal for targeting another of the same similar NAS. Synology to Synology, Churnas to Churnas. Backup to external cloud services. Yes, there's actually quite a few cloud services supported. I have a video on how to do it to Backblaze but there's more than just Backblaze support. You can look at the list on their site for all the different cloud services they have backup to. Synology, same answer, Backblaze and a lot of others plus Synology, Hyperbackup to AC2 cloud. So they do have that as an option and they both have the option to backup to like somewhere custom with things like, you can use R-Sync if you're over here in the Churnas world and you can use Hyperbackup to target like a generic S3 target. So there's different ways you can do it but once again they're not the same so saying they have it and having looked at it is why I have links to some of the videos to dive into it. Plugins and extensions. Yes, via their app catalog and third party catalogs such as TrueChart. So there's actually a lot of applications they have in here. Now their app catalog and some third parties exist because Synology does have some packages that are done by third parties. There's not like a catalog you load but you can find certain apps that you can, it's almost like side loading how you would do it maybe if you're familiar with on a phone but there's certain apps that can be uploaded manually to Synology. But I don't know if Synology maintains an exacting list of those third party apps but they have quite a good application support in there. Application management and setup is where there's a major difference in these especially the home users complain about this a lot. It is really turnkey if you're not technically skilled to set up a Synology. They have really one, two, three click here. Hey, you've now loaded this application. The setup is arguably easy. How do you set up TrueNAS scale apps with shares for host paths would be an example of why it's more complicated to do things in a TrueNAS scale environment? Yes, you can load the applications but loading them and making sure the data is where you think it is is a much more complicated topic. I have a whole video where I dive into that and walk through that nuance. There's not really a lot of videos I've done other than some of the applications themselves with Synology but Synology is pretty much just click it and install it and the application just works and sets things up. Davis made it really, really turnkey and easy. So from that standpoint, they both have apps but how much easier Synology is is hard to put into just the yes and no words about the support. This is where Synology is a we're in the small business. The NVR surveillance system, there's nothing natively built in to TrueNAS scale that offers this Synology surveillance station. We sell a lot of, it's just a great product. It works really, really well. It's one of the biggest things we sell to a lot of small businesses with Synology is going to be this. It has a large variety of cameras and supports and it's easy to use, has a phone app for people who want to monitor it remotely and we do a lot of these installs and they just work really well. They're very reliable, the updates go smooth, the support's good, so I really do recommend it. Backing up your computers, not at this time. I know there's third party things you can do but when it comes to turnkey and I've done a recent review of Active Backup, Active Backup is just dead simple to use when it comes to setting up backups for a office or a network or even home users. Getting Active Backup up and going and loading it, those agents on your system so it automatically backs them up on a schedule. They've made it really, really easy, including the way they do the restores and I even had a review where I talked about the instant restore options they have. If you have a Synology system fast enough to restore to their own hypervisor, just really cool feature. Business feature, backing up Office 365 or G Suite or Google apps or whatever it may be called when you're watching this video. I know right now I think it's called Google apps but G Suite just was what I'm used to typing. The Active Backup for 365 and Google is really nice. We actually use this actively to backup clients. A pretty great feature because this is an expensive license to buy backups for these for a lot of different backup services. Synology having this built in as an incorporated thing along with their Active Backup, these are two really great features that we see. Even some of the smaller businesses with internal IT teams, we've helped them set these up because it just works and it works really well. Especially if you throw a lot of drives in your Synology and you have a lot of data to backup, now you can have a whole second copy that's easy to maintain. Now I have not used PhotoPrism but it is one of the default apps but I didn't see any native phone app at this time for it and it looks pretty neat. I wanna play around with PhotoPrism but I do use Synology Moments and I believe it's changed its name to just Synology Photos now. So Synology Photos, the video is older so it was called Moments when I did the video. Works great, the phone backup works great. You're in control of your data so I can synchronize my phone and privately maintain my whole Synology Photos. The facial recognition is mediocre. That's why I wanna look at PhotoPrism as I heard it's better but once again when it comes to turnkey, Synology and then loading an app on your phone, this makes it really easy to do. Now NextCloud is a great tool that is maintained by NextCloud but also they have it available and I'll do a video soon. I'm setting that up onto your NAS scale because while yes you can just install it making sure your data backed up is, well go look at that video I did on host path setups and there are some things you need to do when you're setting it up. You don't just install it. There's things you have to do to make sure your data is secure. Synology Office works great. It's actually a really cool product. I was actually surprised how well it works. We don't really use this commercially much but I've played around with it and the sharing and once again go back up to that relay sharing. Being able to have a document, be able to share a document with someone on your Synology and have them edit it is a really nice feature especially if you're not wanna pay license fees for office and things like that. This is one of the cool features you get with Synology. File Sync for App, Client and Server. I brought up Sync thing cause it's also in the native apps but I need to do a new video on it but I have some older videos on Sync thing. It's a little bit more complicated to set up. It's not as turnkey but I really like it. I do actively use this for a lot of reasons. Like I said, I'll do some videos on the future on it but you can find the link down below my old videos on Sync thing. But Synology Drive, oh man it just works. It's one of those, this is something we are using just a synchronized files between different servers for a lot of clients that have asked for this to be set up, it works well. And of course people wanna know about playing media like Plex or MB or other third party options that you can get through the TrueTarts catalog which is that extra catalog you can load. It works well but the setup's gonna be a little more complicated than just clicking Plex or MB or even Video Station right in Synology which those are great choices and just generally speaking a lot easier to set up I would say by comparison but they both do have that ability to play media streaming and whatever media volumes you have that you wanna stream to your different devices. Now hopefully this video gives you enough data points so you can make a decision or not make a decision just by both because that's what my decision was. I like some of the features in Synology, I like some of the features in TrueTarts so I'm running both at home and we run both at our office. We love active backup, we are using it at our office to back up some of our workstations. It just works really well. We also have helped a lot of clients with it. I really like TrueTarts, it's where we have our storage targets for our XCPNG. I'm also using the True NAS for all my video editing because it's just very reliable. I'm used to using ZFS and trust it very well and it replicates between my studio and my office to have off-site backups of all the videos I create so this video was done on a True NAS but it could have just as easily been done on a Synology. I'm also a big fan of the Synology surveillance station personally because I'm using it at my home. I like it quite a bit. We're using it at our office alongside other tools. It's definitely a great tool overall. I know that maybe does or doesn't make your decision making it easier but hey, leave your thoughts and comments down below. Head on my forums for a more in-depth discussion or comment on that particular forum discussion and let me know what you think. Appreciate it, take care.