Cloud Storage

Syncthing90.3k★

Syncthing keeps folders in sync across your own machines (laptop, desktop, NAS, server) with no central server, no account and no subscription. Files go device to device, encrypted in transit. It's the self-hosted answer to the sync half of Dropbox, free under MPL 2.0. Install it on two machines, swap device IDs, share a folder, done. Management lives in a local web UI. Devices find each other through public discovery servers, and when a direct connection fails, traffic falls back to a slower community relay. Version 2 moved the database to SQLite, so the first launch after upgrading can take a while on big setups. Nothing is gated. For an always-on copy, run it on a NAS or VPS. Solo and small teams: free, the best way to keep a few machines in sync. Larger teams: look at Nextcloud, because nobody wants to babysit device IDs on 50 laptops. The catch: phones. The official Android app was discontinued in December 2024; the community Syncthing-Fork replaced it. On iOS you need Synctrain, a third-party app. And it's sync, not backup: delete a file on one device and it's gone everywhere, with versioning off until you enable it per folder.

MinIO61.3k★

MinIO was the default open source answer to Amazon S3: a fast, S3-compatible object store you ran anywhere as a single Go binary. That story has changed. The company pivoted to a commercial product called AIStor, the community edition is now distributed as source only with no prebuilt binaries, and the open repository has been archived. The code is still AGPL and still works, but the project's momentum has clearly moved behind the paywall. Before the pivot, MinIO quietly pulled most of the management features out of the open source console: user and policy management, configuration, and monitoring moved to the paid product, leaving the community build with little more than a basic object browser. You can still self-host the server and it still speaks S3 to every tool that expects it. But you are now compiling from source, administering through the command line and config files, and running software the maintainer has effectively stopped developing in the open. For a brand new project, this is hard to recommend as a foundation in 2026. If you already run MinIO and it works, there is no fire to put out, the S3 API is stable. Solo and small teams who just need S3-compatible storage should look at alternatives like SeaweedFS, Garage, or Ceph's object gateway before betting on a frozen project. Teams that want MinIO's old polish and real support are exactly who AIStor is priced for, and that is the point. The catch is the pattern. A tool earns its reputation as the free, no-nonsense S3 replacement, builds a huge install base, then moves the useful parts and the active development behind a commercial product. The code you already have keeps running. The open project you were counting on does not keep growing.

Rclone60.9k★

Rclone is rsync for cloud storage: one free, MIT-licensed command-line tool that copies, syncs, mounts and encrypts files across more than 70 services, including Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Backblaze B2. It checks hashes on every transfer and resumes from the last good file after a dropped connection. Setup is one binary plus rclone config, an interactive walkthrough for each account. Then it's scripting: nightly encrypted backups to B2, Google Drive mounted on a Linux server, a Dropbox to S3 migration. The web GUI is officially experimental, so plan on the terminal and some trial and error with flags. Every feature and backend is free. The paid part is support, from $99/month for 20 minutes of email help to $2,499/month for Enterprise. Solo and small teams: free. Medium teams: free, plus a plan if rclone moves critical data. Large teams: Business or Enterprise for the SOC 2 report and guaranteed response times. The catch is the server side. Rclone published more than 40 security advisories this year, five critical, including unauthenticated command execution through rclone rcd --rc-serve. Copy and sync are fine, but keep any serve or remote control mode off the internet and update to 1.75.2.

Nextcloud37.5k★

Nextcloud is the self-hosted answer to Google Drive, Dropbox and a big chunk of Google Workspace: file sync and sharing, calendar, contacts, mail, video calls and in-browser document editing through Collabora or the new Euro-Office, plus hundreds of apps. The server is free under AGPLv3, with no user cap in the code. Install it with All-in-One (AIO), the official Docker setup. It bundles Postgres, Redis, a tuned PHP-FPM and Borg backups, which handles most of the tuning that made older installs crawl. You still own updates, storage and app sprawl: every app you enable is one more thing to patch. Solo and small teams: free, and a real Drive or Dropbox replacement if someone owns the box. The paid tier sells support, not a different product. Enterprise starts at 100 users, billed yearly: Standard is 71.29€ (about $80) per user, so roughly $8,000/year minimum. Past 1,000 active users without a subscription, the free push notification service gets throttled. The catch: security hygiene is on you. This fall, attackers used a critical flaw in the optional Built-in CODE Server app to plant webshells on Nextcloud servers, weeks before the advisory went public. AIO installs weren't affected.

RustFS36.0k★

RustFS is S3-compatible object storage you run yourself, written in Rust and licensed Apache 2.0. It does erasure coding, distributed pools, versioning, object lock, KMS-backed encryption, replication, lifecycle rules, IAM and OIDC, with a web console. It reached 1.0 in September 2026. Run it single-node or distributed; a pool needs as few as two drives, and two-node pools are valid. The bigger story is MinIO: the open source MinIO repo is archived and no longer maintained, community binaries stopped, and MinIO's free path is now AIStor Free, a single-node, non-redistributable license. RustFS is the most direct Apache-licensed replacement. Moving off MinIO still means copying data over S3, since RustFS can't read MinIO's on-disk format by default. Free under Apache 2.0, including distributed mode. RustFS sells an Enterprise support engagement (migration planning, topology review) with no published price. Solo devs and small teams needing local S3: use it. Larger teams: it's the leading candidate for a MinIO exit, but test hard first. Garage and SeaweedFS are the other open source options. The catch: the security record right up to 1.0 was rough. Dozens of advisories since December 2025, including critical bugs that allowed backdoor service accounts and admin account takeover, and four high-severity IAM and object-lock bugs in August 2026. Keep it patched and off the open internet. Contributors also sign a CLA, so a future relicense is possible.

FileBrowser35.9k★

File Browser is archived. The last release shipped July 27, 2026, and the repo went read-only on August 31, 2026: no more bug or security fixes. It was a single-binary web file manager: point it at a server folder and get upload, download, rename, editing and share links in a browser. Free under Apache 2.0, and that won't change. Existing installs keep working, but the creator says the code can't be patched into shape. Two known flaws, the command runner and sessions that survive logout, will never be fixed. Until you move, keep it off the public internet behind a reverse proxy with its own login, run it unprivileged in a container, and leave the command runner off. Solo and small teams: move to FileBrowser Quantum, the maintained Apache 2.0 fork. It adds OIDC, LDAP, 2FA and WebDAV and removed shell commands entirely. Copyparty and Filestash are other picks; Nextcloud if you need sync. The catch: migrating isn't clean. Quantum can import your old database, but one tester found it reset a restricted user's folder scope and delete permission to full access, so recheck every account first. Quantum also published 31 security advisories in 2026, four critical. Stay current.

Garage4.9k★

Garage is S3-compatible object storage built for small clusters of cheap, mismatched machines instead of enterprise hardware. Point your existing S3 tooling at it, replicate across three nodes in different locations, and it keeps serving through failures. AGPL, completely free, no enterprise edition to upsell you. It's a single Rust binary designed by a French non-profit that hosts services on secondhand hardware, and it shows in the good way: tiny memory footprint, tolerance for high latency between nodes, no Kubernetes required. You still own cluster layout, replication decisions, and capacity planning, but the operational surface is small. Solo and homelab: easier to run than minio/minio has become, and it's the pick for self-hosted S3 today. Small teams with a few servers across locations: it was built for exactly you. Companies needing IAM policies, object versioning, and compliance features should compare MinIO or stay on managed storage like R2. The catch: it's deliberately minimal. Replication only (no erasure coding), no object versioning, and a subset of the S3 API. If your app leans on exotic S3 features, test before you migrate.

s3proxy2.4k★

S3Proxy puts an S3-compatible API in front of storage that isn't S3: Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, OpenStack Swift, SFTP, or a plain local filesystem. Your app keeps speaking S3 while the backend becomes swappable. One Java process, Apache 2.0, free. Running it is a Docker container or an executable jar with a properties file, and reference Kubernetes manifests ship in the repo. The killer development use: point it at the local filesystem and integration-test your S3 code with no AWS bill and no network dependency. Use it for tests, for migrating between clouds without rewriting storage code, or for bolting S3 semantics onto legacy storage. When you want an actual self-hosted object store rather than a translation layer in front of one, look at Garage or RustFS. MinIO's open source repo is archived. The catch: it's a proxy, so every request pays an extra hop, and S3 API coverage is broad but not total. Newer S3 calls and some multipart edge cases may not translate to every backend. Test your specific access patterns first.

files-sdk1.6k★

Files SDK is a TypeScript library that gives you one API across S3, R2, GCS, Azure Blob, Vercel Blob, Dropbox, and the local filesystem. The methods are predictable: upload, download, head, delete, copy, list, url, signedUploadUrl. MIT licensed, web-standards-friendly (Blob, File, ReadableStream, Uint8Array, ArrayBuffer, string). npm install files-sdk plus the adapter you want, like files-sdk/s3 or files-sdk/r2. Each adapter is tree-shakeable so you only ship what you use. There is an escape hatch (files.raw) when you need provider-specific behavior. Bundled tool wrappers exist for the Vercel AI SDK, OpenAI Responses, OpenAI Agents, and the Anthropic Claude Agent SDK, which makes it useful for letting agents upload and fetch files. Solo developers and small teams building products that might switch storage providers should use this. It is the kind of abstraction you wish you had wired in before you shipped six S3-specific code paths across your codebase. The catch is the project is young and small. Version 1.2 shipped in May 2026, with one primary maintainer (Hayden Bleasel). For internal projects and side work, that is fine. For mission-critical infrastructure where you cannot risk a stalled dependency, vendor it or wait until the project has more contributors.