See how Shade stacks up against Synology QuickConnect and why Shade is more scalable for teams and individuals alike
Key takeaways
Security & Client Delivery
Shade offers robust security and permission controls with advanced encryption and compliance measures. Addiotnally, we streamline management of permissions from subfolders to drives, including easy collaboration via ShadeFS's mounting and web sharing features. This ensures fast and secure delivery of assets for both internal and external teams.
Ease of Use
Shade takes less than 5 minutes to setup, allowing any type of user to easily get onboarded and start using the platform. It doesn’t call for complex configurations and is super intuitive.
Third-Party That Brokers Access
QuickConnect is not an in-house solution built by Synology or QNAP; if it gets hacked, your NAS gets hacked. It is a third-party that brokers access to your NAS, which is a tradeoff as now there is another access point to your NAS. Keeping everything local and within your reach is vital. Shade allows for a hybrid solution so you can feel comfortable bringing your NAS, hardware, or cloud provider into Shade.
Ready to switch from QuickConnect to Shade?
Use Something that Scales with Your Team
Using QuickConnect for your daily workflows is not sustainable and difficult to configure and set up. Not only does it have large setup constraints and require lengthy configurations, but it does not offer the full capabilities that every party (IT managers, creative directors, editors) in your team needs. Your creative director is not going to care about the P2P sync feature (or how it’s configured)—he needs the asset that he wants to find, and he wants it in the hands of everyone that needs it, that’s it.
Shade bridges the gap between a technically mature solution and a user experience designed for creative tools and teams to work with their files, find exactly what they need, and share files without having to bother IT. QuickConnect can be used for small teams, but as your team grows, you will need to find a more complete and seamless solution like Shade.
Shade also provides multimodal AI search that allows you to quickly sift through millions of images to find the perfect shot that you need, so you never lose an asset again.
User Experience & Journeys Matter
Investing in the customer is important and understanding their pain points is even more relevant. QuickConnect is an outdated tool with poor UI that requires many steps to work.
Shade is designed to be used across the team internally and externally. With Shade-published links, you can quickly deliver the last mile to clients, ask for feedback, and more. External collaborators also receive great experiences via ShadeFS’s mounting and web sharing.
Permission Management is Vital for Security
QuickConnect is a third-party service that NAS solutions uses for its users to share and collaborate on files that are located on-prem. This creates many stakeholders gaining access to your data and greater risk for security risks. The more we share files via multiple software, the more we lose track of who has access to what.
With Shade, your data is unified in one pane of glass because it works in a hybrid environment so that all of your data, no matter where it is, is hosted locally, on-prem, or in the cloud. Being in control of your data really matters. That’s why Shade lets you sync your permission management once, and all of your downstream files (internal and external) can be securely managed with one solution.
Reason Not to Use Shade and Use QuickConnect
If you already have a Synology NAS and wanted to share your assets with your team, choosing QuickConnect is a no brainer. However, it is important to know that it takes time to setup and not easy to use. Additionally, QuickConnect is a third party solution that poses security risks too. In contrast, Shade allows any type of user to easily get onboarded and start accessing and sharing files
