Object Storage

MinIO60.6k★

If you need to store files — images, backups, data exports, anything — and want an API that works exactly like Amazon S3 but runs on your own servers, that's MinIO. Drop-in S3 replacement. Every tool that speaks S3 speaks MinIO. Performance is the headline. MinIO consistently benchmarks as one of the fastest object stores available, open source or not. Written in Go, single binary, runs anywhere. Docker, Kubernetes, bare metal, even a Raspberry Pi if you're feeling ambitious. 60k+ GitHub stars. This is the established standard for self-hosted object storage. It's what companies use when they want S3 compatibility without the AWS bill. Fully free to self-host under AGPL-3.0. No feature gates on the open source version — erasure coding, encryption, bucket replication, identity management, all included. The Enterprise license (MinIO SUBNET) adds a support subscription and some management tooling, but the software itself is identical. The catch: AGPL-3.0 means if you modify MinIO and offer it as a service, you must open source your changes. For internal use, this doesn't matter. For SaaS companies embedding it, talk to a lawyer. Also, operating a production MinIO cluster with replication across nodes is real ops work — not a weekend project.

rustfs23.9k★

If you need S3-compatible object storage that you run yourself — storing files, backups, images, artifacts, anything — RustFS is a MinIO alternative written in Rust. It speaks the S3 API, so any tool that works with AWS S3 works with RustFS. The pitch is performance: Rust's memory safety and efficiency versus MinIO's Go implementation. Self-hosting is free under Apache 2.0. You get S3-compatible API, erasure coding for data durability, distributed mode for spreading storage across nodes, and a web console for management. The catch: this is very new. At 23K stars with 317 weekly star velocity, it's getting a lot of attention, but attention isn't maturity. MinIO has been battle-tested in production for years. RustFS documentation is still developing, and the ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and operational knowledge is thin. If you're storing data you can't afford to lose, this is a risk. If you're experimenting with self-hosted object storage or building a non-critical pipeline, it's worth a look. But for production storage, MinIO is the safer bet today.