5 productivity apps that made my NAS more useful than Google Workspace

Google Workspace is the industry default productivity suite, and rightly so — it’s fast, reliable, has excellent integrations, and offers handy collaboration features. However, it is just another subscription added to your credit card, which starts to bother you, especially if your team size is growing.

When I set up a NAS at home, I realized it’s much more than just a glorified hard drive. With the right apps, my NAS got primed to replace Google’s suite one app at a time. And honestly, it’s been a fun ride trying out and piecing together my own alternatives.

Here are the apps and tools that made my NAS feel less like storage and more like a productivity platform.

Self-hosted office

Collaboration tools, but on my own server

It didn’t even occur to me that my NAS could be used for document creation and editing at first, but it turns out it can. Apps like Synology Office and Nextcloud Office (you have a handful of other options too) give me Word- and Excel-like functionality right in the browser. I can edit text documents, put together spreadsheets, and even create some slides — all without leaving my private server.

It was honestly quite surprising, but collaboration also worked well for me. It let multiple people edit the document in real time, add comments and suggestions (which sync up instantly), and the whole experience felt close to what Google Docs has to offer. And the best part is that there’s no subscription eating into my wallet each month. The privacy benefits of going local are also unparalleled.

File storage

And syncing with full control

Perhaps the biggest benefit of Google Workspace is Google Drive. That cloud space enables all the collaboration to happen, and it even offers offline tools to sync your local files with the cloud. Thankfully, many NAS operating systems and brands offer first-party replacements, like QNAP Qsync or Synology Drive. And they do the same thing as Google, from syncing files across devices to keeping past versions of everything.

If I want to ensure stricter permissions on a folder, I can set those down to the tiniest detail. More importantly, when I’m dealing with large files, those super-fast LAN speeds make everything fly compared to Google Drive. Uploading and downloading stuff to and from the cloud takes up so much time that I’m now happier hosting my important files locally.

Notes and to-do apps

And bringing everything under one roof

Notes have been a mess for me. They were scattered across Google Keep, Docs, and some even lived on Notion. And all of them felt important, as if they were digital family heirlooms I couldn’t get rid of. I’ll admit it took me a lot of effort and many weeks to finish the job, but it felt triumphant when I finally consolidated everything and completed the transfer to the NAS.

Once again, you don’t have to look beyond the first-party notes apps that a lot of NAS makers offer, but you can install whichever notes app floats your boat as a Docker container. While their feature sets may vary, a common theme among them is that I control the app I use. It won’t happen that one day I wake up to the news that the app is shutting down a couple of weeks from now.

Chat and calendars

For even more privacy

Google Chat and Google Calendar are fantastic tools for collaboration, both internally with your team and externally with partners. But they come with strings attached — you have to plug into the Google ecosystem, which is something you may want to avoid once you become privacy-conscious. And when you have your own server offering the best kind of privacy, why settle for anything less? That’s their biggest selling point: nothing leaves your NAS unless you want it to. This level of control is honestly something you wouldn’t want to give up.

Take Nextcloud Talk, for instance; it offers the full stack of features, covering the basics and beyond, with stuff like direct messaging, group chats, event invites, recurring reminders, and whatnot. With everything stored on a single hub, the cross-app integration is as good as what you get with Google Drive, if not better.

Search and automations

You can do much, much more with a NAS

Google is the master of search, even in Drive, but my NAS has its own tricks up its sleeve. QNAP’s Qfiling, for instance, automatically organizes files by the rules I set — photos get dumped into month folders, invoices go to the finance folder, and so on. Now, pair that with Qsirch, which recently got a solid AI boost to let you look up any file in normal conversational language, and finding your files becomes a breeze.

And since none of this requires an internet connection, you’re not bombarded with ads everywhere. I’ve made my NAS even smarter with handy automations for backups, sync schedules, snapshots, and more, transforming this storage into a smart device that does a lot more. This setup gives me better control over how my files are organized and how they show up in searches.

Save money with your NAS

Bringing home a NAS not only improves your workflow but also helps you save a lot of cash by cutting down on subscriptions. While an office suite is just one part of the puzzle, you can replace several online services with your NAS. Beyond the money savings, the whole upgrade process feels rewarding since you put everything together piece by piece yourself.