File Storage
2 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars — scroll down for our analysis.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Language | License | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MinIO High-performance S3-compatible object store | 60.5k | — | Go | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 | 74 |
 SeaweedFS Distributed storage for S3 and file systems | 31.2k | +167/wk | Go | Apache License 2.0 | 79 |
Our Analysis
MinIO was the gold standard for self-hosted S3-compatible object storage — fast, simple, and production-proven. Then it went AGPL in 2021, moved enterprise features behind AIStor paywalls, and in 2025 put the community edition in maintenance mode. The technology is still excellent. The trajectory is not. SeaweedFS (Apache 2.0) is the best direct replacement — production-ready, permissively licensed, adopted by Kubeflow as its default storage backend. Ceph handles petabyte scale but is operationally complex. Garage is lightweight but AGPL and limited to ~50TB. If you're starting a new project, use SeaweedFS or evaluate Ceph for large-scale needs. If you're already running MinIO, plan your migration — the community edition won't get new features. The catch: MinIO's raw performance for large objects (20MB+) still beats SeaweedFS by ~2x. The AGPL license means any network-facing modifications require source disclosure. And the maintenance-mode announcement means no new features, with security fixes evaluated case-by-case. The open-source community has moved on.
SeaweedFS is the distributed storage system for teams that need S3-compatible object storage without MinIO's license baggage. It handles billions of small files efficiently, offers both object storage (S3 API) and file system access (FUSE mount), and runs with a lower memory footprint than the competition. If you need self-hosted object storage and MinIO's BSL license concerns you, SeaweedFS is the leading open-source alternative. MinIO is faster for frequently-accessed objects but its license restricts competing services. Ceph is the battle-tested heavyweight for massive deployments. Garage is the lightweight option for small clusters. Commercially, S3, GCS, and Azure Blob are the managed options. Kubeflow Pipelines adopted SeaweedFS as its default storage, replacing MinIO. The architecture handles the "billions of small files" problem that MinIO solves poorly. The catch: the documentation is good but not great. The community is smaller than MinIO's or Ceph's, so finding help with edge cases takes longer. Operational tooling and monitoring integrations are less mature. And if you're running on a single cloud provider, their native object storage is almost certainly simpler and cheaper than running your own distributed storage cluster.