Garage vs Cloudflare R2
Both are alternatives to Amazon S3. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Cloudflare R2 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.
Cloudflare R2
S3-compatible with zero egress fees — the direct answer to the complaint.
R2 is Cloudflare's object store and its defining feature is a deliberate attack on S3's pricing: storage around $0.015 per GB per month and no egress charges whatsoever. For anything read frequently over the internet — media, assets, public datasets — that single difference can turn a four-figure monthly bill into a two-figure one. It is S3-API compatible, so migration is largely a config change. It is proprietary and hosted, which is the honest trade, and it makes Cloudflare rather than Amazon the party you depend on.
Side by side
| Garage | Cloudflare R2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 95 | 40 |
| 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 $0.015/GB/month storage. No egress charges. Free tier included. 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
Cloudflare R2
Strengths
- +Zero egress fees — the single biggest cost difference in this category
- +S3-compatible API, so migration is mostly configuration
- +Cheaper storage than S3 as well
- +Integrates with Cloudflare Workers and the CDN
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted — you have swapped one vendor for another
- −Fewer surrounding services than S3's ecosystem
- −No deep-archive tier comparable to Glacier
- −Ties you into Cloudflare's platform decisions
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-04. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.