MinIO's community edition is archived. What still runs in 2026
MinIO's community edition is archived. What actually changed, what it means if you run it, and the open-source S3 options still maintained in 2026.
In December 2025, MinIO put its open-source repository in maintenance mode. In February 2026 it updated the README with language most readers took as end-of-life, and on April 25, 2026 the repository was formally archived. It has been read-only since.
A MinIO Community Edition deployment still works today, which is the risk. Storage keeps serving while its upstream goes dark, and nothing warns you until a vulnerability lands in code nobody is patching.
What changed for MinIO Community Edition
MinIO did not relicense. The server code is still AGPLv3 and still open source. What ended was maintenance and distribution. There are no new releases, no reviewed patches, and no official community binaries, so the path went from pulling an image to building frozen source yourself.
For the storage layer under your cloud backups, your uploads, and your build artifacts, that changes the risk. The last community release shipped a privilege-escalation fix in October 2025. The next CVE in that codebase is yours to find, patch, build, and ship, on the one piece of infrastructure you most want to be boring.
MinIO alternatives still maintained in 2026
Garage, SeaweedFS, RustFS and the SILO fork are compared row by row, with sources, on MinIO community edition alternatives.
There are three honest options.
Keep running it and own the maintenance. That works if you have Go expertise on staff and the appetite to track CVEs against a codebase nobody upstream is watching.
Move to a commercial product, MinIO's own AIStor or someone else's. Read the license and the exit path before you commit, so the next wind-down doesn't strand you the same way.
Move to an S3-compatible engine whose open-source upstream is still alive. Garage, built by Deuxfleurs, is AGPLv3, actively maintained, and designed for the self-hosted, multi-node job MinIO used to do. SeaweedFS and RustFS are the other engines MinIO users are weighing.
| MinIO Community Edition | Garage | Commercial (MinIO or other) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | AGPLv3 | AGPLv3 | Proprietary / commercial |
| Upstream status | Archived, read-only since April 2026 | Active, still shipping (Deuxfleurs) | Vendor-controlled |
| Security patches | You build and ship them | Upstream, and you can send them back | Vendor, while your contract holds |
| Official releases | None, frozen source | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-node / distributed | Yes, but unmaintained | Yes, designed for it | Yes |
| S3-compatible | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Who carries maintenance | You, alone | Shared with a live community | The vendor, until terms change |
Where Storm Buckets fits
Garage is the engine under Storm Buckets. We run it in production, file issues upstream, and have three fixes merged into Garage, among them a CORS fix in the S3 layer. We run the public release we document, and there is nothing in our stack you cannot read.
Storm Pulse, the agent that manages our nodes, is open source too. You can take Garage and Pulse and run all of it yourself for free. If you would rather someone else carried the operations, that is hosted Garage on Storm Buckets, run by a company whose only job is this layer.
Storm Buckets is hosted and operated entirely in Canada, S3-compatible, with Garage underneath. Every S3 and admin operation against your account is recorded, and you can watch it happen in real time.
The lesson for self-hosted storage
MinIO's wind-down followed a familiar pattern. The company and the commons were the same entity, and the company changed its mind. The defense is infrastructure you can read, on a license that cannot be revoked out from under you, run by people who feed the upstream. Trusting a different vendor moves the same risk to a new logo.
Frequently asked questions
Is MinIO Community Edition discontinued?
Effectively yes. MinIO put the open-source repository in maintenance mode in December 2025 and formally archived it on April 25, 2026. It has been read-only since, with no new releases, reviewed patches, or official community binaries.
Is MinIO still open source?
The Community Edition server code is still AGPLv3, so it is still open source. Maintenance and distribution ended. You can read and build the frozen source, and nobody upstream is patching it.
Does MinIO Community Edition still work in 2026?
Existing deployments keep serving until a CVE lands in a codebase nobody upstream is watching. Finding, patching, building, and shipping that fix is then on you.
What is the best maintained MinIO alternative?
For a self-hosted, S3-compatible, multi-node engine with an active open-source upstream, Garage (by Deuxfleurs, AGPLv3) is the closest like-for-like replacement. The MinIO to Garage migration guide walks through the move with rclone. If you would rather not run the storage yourself, Storm Buckets is Garage hosted and operated in Canada.
Can I use Storm Buckets for cloud backups?
Yes. Point restic, rclone, or any S3 backup client at a bucket, or let Storm pull scheduled copies from another S3 provider. Proxmox and TrueNAS have their own guides in the Storm guide.
Storm Buckets is in alpha, with access granted per account. If you are leaving MinIO and want a Canadian, open, auditable place to land, create an account and request access. Storm Pulse is public at git.stormdevelopments.ca/official-public/storm-pulse.
Hosted and Operated in Canada.