Extensions
Fancy a side dish of plugins to go with the main course?
Dissatisfied with the default features on offer with the distributions on our list? Then worry no more. With the exception of EasyNAS, all the NAS distributions offer extensive choice of plugins. Best of all, you can use the web interface to easily install these plugins, but beware. Unlike other software installers on desktop distributions, the web interface won’t inform you of the pertinent details such as the total download size for any plugin. So, if you decide to turn your NAS installation into a media streaming server, don’t be surprised if the installation of Emby server takes a long time.
FreeNAS supports a number of third-party plugins, such as Transmission for bittorrent, btsync to sync with a wide variety of devices without exposing your data to others, and OwnCloud to host your own cloud services server. As an added security feature, all plugins on FreeNAS are implemented within native jails. You can find a list of all available plugins in the official documentation.
You must head over to the official NAS4Free forums for information about and discussion on the features of the supported plugins, called extensions, and the installation process, best practices and so forth. One of the most popular NAS4Free extension is OneButtonInstaller (OBI), which is intended to serve as a centralised extension manager.
OpenMediaVault boasts of several official and third-party plugins, which you can install and enable according to your needs and requirements. To browse a list of all the officially supported plugins, head over to System>Plugins. The page lists over 40 plugins, which are divided into categories such as Administration, Backup, Downloaders, Filesystems, Network and so on.