Garage vs Backblaze B2
Both are alternatives to Amazon S3. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Backblaze B2 vs Garage — same comparison, one verdict.
Garage
Object storage for geographically scattered, unreliable hardware.
Garage is a lightweight S3-compatible store built by Deuxfleurs for a case the others handle badly: nodes spread across different homes and cities on ordinary connections, where latency is high and machines come and go. It is deliberately small, has no single point of failure, and runs on hardware you would not consider adequate for object storage. AGPL-3.0. It is the most niche entry here and it earns its place by being the honest answer for community and self-hosted infrastructure rather than a datacentre.
Backblaze B2
A quarter of S3's storage price, with free egress to partner networks.
B2 is about $0.006 per GB per month — roughly a quarter of S3 Standard — with free egress to Cloudflare and other Bandwidth Alliance partners and generous free egress otherwise. It is S3-API compatible and the company has published its storage-durability statistics for years, which is a level of transparency the hyperscalers do not match. For backups and archives specifically it is very hard to beat on price. It is proprietary and hosted, and the ecosystem around it is small compared with AWS.
Side by side
| Garage | Backblaze B2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 95 | 42 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Local-first | Yes | No |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. Designed for commodity and second-hand hardware. | About $0.006/GB/month storage; free egress to Bandwidth Alliance partners. Checked 2026-08-04. |
Garage edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Garage
Strengths
- +Built for geographically distributed nodes on unreliable links
- +Extremely light — runs on hardware other stores refuse
- +No single point of failure by design
- +AGPL-3.0 with genuinely community governance
Trade-offs
- −Smallest project here by a wide margin
- −Fewer S3 API features implemented than MinIO
- −Not aimed at high-throughput single-datacentre workloads
- −Very small community if you get stuck
Backblaze B2
Strengths
- +Roughly a quarter of S3's storage price
- +Free egress to Cloudflare and other partner networks
- +S3-compatible API
- +Publishes real durability and drive-failure statistics
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted
- −Far smaller service ecosystem than AWS
- −Fewer regions, which matters for latency and residency
- −Not built for high-throughput analytics workloads
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Facts verified 2026-08-04. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.