UGREEN wins the hardware fight decisively; Synology still wins the software fight. The question is which fight your household is in.
At every bay count in the live table below, UGREEN ships a faster CPU, DDR5 memory, and better networking — often 10GbE against Synology's 2.5GbE — for less money. Synology answers with DSM: the most polished NAS operating system, the deepest first-party apps, and two decades of security track record that UGOS Pro simply cannot match yet. Buy UGREEN if you compare spec sheets; buy Synology if the person administering the box would rather not know it has a spec sheet.
| Bays | UGREEN | Synology | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2-bay | NASync DH2300 2-Bay $199.99 | DiskStation DS223 2-Bay Diskless $270.74 | $70.75 |
| 4-bay | NASync DXP4800 Plus 4-Bay $619.99 | DiskStation DS423 4-Bay Diskless $399.99 | $220.00 |
| 6-bay | NASync DXP6800 Plus 6-Bay $939.15 | none in stock | — |
| 8-bay | NASync DXP8800 Plus 8-Bay $1,369.99 | DiskStation DS1825+ 8-Bay $1,249.99 | $120.00 |
Cheapest in-stock model per brand at each bay count, refreshed every 2 hours. Out-of-stock models are excluded entirely — a "none in stock" cell means exactly that, today.
This is the least ambiguous hardware comparison on this site. Take the mainstream 4-bay tier: UGREEN's DXP4800 Plus carries a five-core Pentium Gold 8505, 8GB of DDR5 expandable to 64GB, two NVMe slots and a native 10GbE port. Synology's DS925+ answers with a four-core Ryzen V1500B — an embedded chip design now many years old — 4GB of ECC DDR4 expandable to 32GB, two NVMe slots usable mainly for caching, and 2.5GbE. The UGREEN is typically cheaper. That pattern repeats at six and eight bays, where UGREEN's i5-1235U and dual 10GbE face Synology's same V1500B platform stretched across bigger chassis.
Two hardware points go to Synology, and they matter to specific buyers. First, ECC memory across the Plus line — error-correcting RAM is genuinely valuable for long-lived filesystems holding business data, and UGREEN's desktop line does not offer it. Second, ecosystem accessories: Synology's expansion units, spare trays and certified parts pipeline exist in a way UGREEN's young accessory catalog does not. Neither point rescues the price-performance comparison; both are legitimate reasons a particular buyer ignores it.
One caution cuts the other way: UGREEN's transcoding advantage is total. Every Intel NASync has a Quick Sync iGPU; no current Ryzen-based Synology Plus model has any iGPU. A Plex or Jellyfin household that transcodes has no Synology option in this fight at all — the comparison collapses to which UGREEN to buy.
DSM is why this comparison exists. Synology's operating system remains the reference: Synology Photos genuinely replaces a cloud photo service, Drive syncs a family's devices with clients that behave, Active Backup covers PCs and Microsoft 365 without licensing games, Surveillance Station leads the category, and Btrfs snapshots with Snapshot Replication make point-in-time recovery a checkbox. The app ecosystem is deep, the documentation thorough, and the security response process battle-tested over two decades. When people say you buy Synology for the software, this catalog is what they mean.
UGOS Pro is a genuinely good young OS — clean interface, competent storage management, snapshots, Docker on every Intel model, a photo app with AI tagging that improves quarterly — and it is shipping features at a pace Synology has not shown in years. What it lacks is depth and history: the third-party catalog is thin, backup tooling is basic beside Active Backup, surveillance is not a serious offering, and the security track record is short because the platform is young. UGREEN buyers hedge this two ways: the essentials most homes need are already solid, and the hardware runs TrueNAS beautifully if UGOS ever disappoints.
The honest framing: Synology sells a complete appliance where the software is the product; UGREEN sells outstanding hardware where the software is a fast-improving bonus. Neither description is an insult — they describe different purchases at different prices, and the live gap between those prices is in the table above.
Make the premium concrete with the mainstream pair. Choosing the DS925+ over the DXP4800 Plus at today's live prices means paying more to receive: DSM and its app catalog, ECC memory, and Synology's support pipeline. It also means giving up: the 10GbE port (Synology's 2.5GbE moves large files at a quarter of the speed), the faster CPU, DDR5 with four times the memory ceiling, and hardware transcoding entirely. Written out that way, the trade stops being abstract — you are buying software and institutional maturity with hardware, roughly a category of connectivity's worth.
The same exercise at six-plus bays is harsher on Synology: the DXP6800 Pro's 10-core i5 and dual 10GbE face the DS1525+'s four-core V1500B and 2.5GbE at a higher Synology price. At this tier the buyer is usually technical enough to live without DSM's hand-holding, which is why the big UGREEN boxes are the segment where Synology loses the most credible customers. The live face-off table above keeps the exact dollar figures current on both matchups.
The purchase price is only the opening bid, so project the full arc. On hardware longevity the brands roughly tie — both build competent boxes, and drives fail long before enclosures. On software support the projections differ in kind: Synology's history says a DiskStation bought today receives DSM security updates well past a decade, a record no young platform can promise; UGREEN's trajectory says UGOS Pro will gain features faster than DSM does, but the honest answer about year eight is that nobody knows. Buyers keeping a NAS to end-of-life should weight Synology's record; buyers who refresh hardware every four or five years are paying for a longevity guarantee they will never redeem.
Energy and expansion round out the picture. Power draw is drive-dominated and effectively identical between the brands at equal bays. Expansion diverges: Synology sells eSATA/USB expansion units that bolt more bays onto an existing DiskStation, while UGREEN's answer is that its boxes are cheap enough to simply buy bigger up front — a 6-bay DXP6800 often costs less than a 4-bay DiskStation plus its expansion unit. Run both shapes through our NAS Builder and the arithmetic usually favors UGREEN's buy-bigger-now approach, unless you already own the Synology.
Resale is the quiet Synology advantage: DSM demand keeps used DiskStations liquid at strong prices, while UGREEN's used market is too young to price. If you habitually sell hardware forward every few years, Synology's premium partially returns at exit — the same dynamic our upgrade planner captures for drives.
Buy UGREEN if any of these describe you: you transcode media (Synology's Ryzen models cannot), you want 10GbE without add-in cards or premium tiers, you run containers and want CPU headroom, you plan a TrueNAS build on premium hardware, or you simply refuse to pay more for less silicon. The DXP4800 Plus at its live price is the single best hardware value in the NAS market, and this comparison is a large part of why.
Buy Synology if: the NAS serves non-technical users who need photos, sync and backup to simply work; surveillance is part of the plan; your data is business-critical and ECC plus Active Backup plus a proven security pipeline is worth a premium; or you are already invested in DSM workflows and migration friction outweighs hardware envy. The premium is real and measurable in the face-off table — what it buys is the absence of surprises.
The switching costs deserve one honest paragraph. Moving an existing Synology household to UGREEN means re-homing photo libraries, sync clients and backup jobs into younger equivalents — days of work and some feature loss, which is exactly the moat DSM is built to be. Moving UGREEN to Synology is easier but means accepting the hardware downgrade you originally rejected. Most buyers should make this choice once, at purchase, with the live numbers above in front of them.
And if neither answer satisfies, remember the fight has more corners: QNAP splits the difference with expandable hardware and a mature OS, and TerraMaster undercuts everyone for buyers who bring their own software. The hub's decision cards track all four positions at live prices, and the NAS Builder totals any of them as a complete build — the comparison worth trusting is the one priced today, not the one written last year.
On hardware per dollar, clearly yes — faster CPUs, DDR5, 10GbE and transcoding iGPUs at lower live prices, visible in the face-off table above. On software maturity, ecosystem depth and security track record, Synology remains ahead. The right choice depends on whether hardware or software is your binding constraint.
Not yet, and it is improving faster than DSM. UGOS Pro covers the essentials well — storage, snapshots, Docker, media, photos — with a clean interface. DSM's advantages are depth: Active Backup, Surveillance Station, a mature app ecosystem, and twenty years of security history. For a household file-and-media server the gap is modest; for advanced workflows it is real.
For core duties — file service, backups, snapshots, containers, media — yes, and it transcodes where Synology's Ryzen models cannot. The gaps are specific: no ECC memory option, no equivalent to Active Backup's breadth or Surveillance Station, and a thinner third-party catalog. If one of those gaps is your use case, it decides the comparison.
UGREEN, at every bay count where both brands currently stock a model — and the gap widens once you count what the money buys (10GbE vs 2.5GbE, DDR5 vs DDR4, newer CPUs). The face-off table above shows today's exact gap per bay count, refreshed every two hours.
No — DSM 7.3 reversed the 2025 Plus-series drive restrictions, and current models accept standard NAS drives normally. The episode is worth remembering as evidence of how Synology thinks about lock-in, but it is no longer a practical obstacle to buying one.
UGREEN, and it is not close: every Intel NASync hardware-transcodes 4K via Quick Sync, while Synology's current Ryzen-based Plus models have no iGPU at all. Only direct-play-only Synology households can ignore this. Our best-NAS-for-Plex guide covers the full picture across all brands.