MinIO 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 MinIO — same comparison, one verdict.
MinIO
TOP PICKThe S3 API on your own hardware — same calls, no egress bill.
MinIO is a high-performance object server that speaks the S3 API closely enough that most applications need only a changed endpoint. Run it on a spare machine, a rack, or across a cluster; it handles erasure coding, versioning and encryption. AGPL-3.0, around 61k stars. For anyone whose objection to S3 is the egress bill rather than the storage price, this removes it entirely — the data is on hardware you already pay for. AGPL is the caveat: read it before you embed MinIO in a product you distribute.
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
| MinIO | Backblaze B2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 92 | 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. Commercial licence and support available from MinIO Inc. | About $0.006/GB/month storage; free egress to Bandwidth Alliance partners. Checked 2026-08-04. |
MinIO is Macrostack's recommended Amazon S3 alternative, so it's our pick here.
MinIO
Strengths
- +S3-compatible API — most applications need one endpoint changed
- +No egress charges at all, because the data never leaves your network
- +Genuinely fast; used for high-throughput analytics workloads
- +Erasure coding, versioning and encryption built in
Trade-offs
- −AGPL-3.0 needs reading if you distribute a product containing it
- −You own durability now — replication and backups are your design
- −No Glacier equivalent for cheap cold archive
- −Recent licensing and feature changes have unsettled some users
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.