MinIO alternatives, compared.

The short answer

For a small team or homelab replacing a small MinIO, Garage won all three of its matches, on the conditions in its section.

What each one supports

Head to head

MinIO: the community edition is frozen

The last community release is RELEASE.2025-10-15T17-29-55Z. Free Docker images and binaries stopped that month, the admin console was stripped from the community build earlier in 2025, and the repository is read-only. High-severity 2026 advisories such as CVE-2026-41145, an unauthenticated object write, are fixed only in the commercial AIStor.

Two maintained paths keep MinIO's code. AIStor Free runs on a single node under a commercial license, with multi-node priced by quote. The other is SILO.

SILO: MinIO, still patched

SILO is a MinIO fork maintained by PGSTY, the company behind the Pigsty PostgreSQL distribution. It was pgsty/minio until its rename. It is AGPL, restores the admin console the community build lost, publishes images, and ships the 2026 CVE fixes, with a release roughly every month, most recently RELEASE.2026-10-18.

It is the only path that needs no migration: same code, same features, same on-disk format. The trade is the one MinIO already taught, a single company maintaining the code you store on. Read its license and its release history before you commit, and keep a copy outside it.

Garage: light, simple, and narrower than MinIO

Garage is built by Deuxfleurs for clusters spread across sites over the open internet. In one independent single-node benchmark it idled at about 53 MB of memory, against 424 MB for MinIO and 345 MB for RustFS. It ships no default credentials, and its permission model is per key, per bucket.

• No versioning, Object Lock or bucket policies. WORM backups with Veeam, restic or Kopia need another engine. The compatibility page lists the rest.
• Fsync is off by default. metadata_fsync and data_fsync both default to false, which the configuration reference describes as safe under geo-replication. On one node, turn both on and snapshot the metadata.
• Replication, never erasure coding. Three copies cost three times the raw disk, where erasure-coded engines run at roughly 1.25 to 1.4 times.
• Three nodes is the honest minimum. One node gives up Garage's main durability strength, and open issue #1454 reports buckets and keys disappearing on single-node installs.
• A small team. Garage is funded by EU NLnet grants. The funded admin web UI has not shipped, so administration is the CLI and the admin API.

SeaweedFS: the broadest S3 surface, the most to run

SeaweedFS keeps more of MinIO's feature set than either rival, including Object Lock with governance and compliance modes, and it is fast with very large numbers of small files. Erasure coding is RS(10,4), applied in the background to warm volumes.

A deployment is masters, volume servers and a filer with its own store, and replica repair runs when you run volume.fix.replication, so schedule it. The S3 gateway allows every request until you configure an identity, and through 4.48 a DeleteBucket on a non-empty bucket silently deletes every object and returns success. The project published 25 security advisories between June and September 2026, nine of them critical, and depends heavily on one maintainer.

RustFS: the closest MinIO drop-in, five weeks stable

RustFS follows MinIO's design, with one binary, erasure sets and pools, a console, and a preview migration path from MinIO's on-disk format. It is Apache 2.0. In the same benchmark as Garage it tied on concurrent writes and was faster on single-worker reads, 399 operations a second against Garage's 264, with Garage running fsync off.

Its first stable release, 1.0.0, shipped on 2026-09-16. The repository carries 43 security advisories in ten months, and its Object Lock guarantee has been bypassed twice, most recently fixed on 2026-10-18. Change the default rustfsadmin credentials first, and treat its WORM features as unproven for compliance until the record is longer.

Where Storm fits

Storm Buckets is Garage, hosted and operated entirely in Canada, with three fixes of ours merged upstream. It carries Garage's limits, so there is no versioning or Object Lock, and Standard storage is one zone on RAIDZ3-backed disks. To run Garage yourself, start with the migration guide and our hardening notes. To have us run it, see hosted Garage on Storm Buckets.

Leave MinIO for Garage, run for you.

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