App to Add Third-Party Packages on Synology NAS

by Rian

Synology had a rough year in 2025 with its new policy — now retracted — on HDDs, but it didn’t outright kill the consumer NAS brand. In fact, when I did some research into what could be the possible alternatives to Synology as a platform, there weren’t many that offered community supports and different builds one could try for themselves. Raspberry Pi came close, but as the hardware was never meant to be a NAS, most of the builds and softwares were geared toward performance and had the appearance of rat’s nest.

SynoCommunity is a third-party package depository for DSM. Simply follow the instructions on the website to add it as a source, and any packages offered by SynoCommunity can be installed from Package Center. Some of the packages — I can’t be the only one who prefers nano text editor — are definite lifesavers, if not obvious QoL improvement.

Most of the additional features one could hope for out of consumer level NAS are likely already available on SynoCommunity — it’s better to install and forget then to build an entirely new DIY project that will run once on your system. My NAS is not particularly powerful enough to replace Raspberry Pi DIY projects, but for any projects that involve either x86 or NAS, I found it to be more accessible to rely on Synology as a platform. After all, if I had a need for certain feature, there was likely someone else before me who had a similar thought. Only this time, these efforts are maintained as a group sum of community support.