MinIO vs Garage
Both are alternatives to Amazon S3. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Garage 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.
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.
Side by side
| MinIO | Garage | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 92 | 95 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Pricing | Free and open source. Commercial licence and support available from MinIO Inc. | Free and open source. Designed for commodity and second-hand hardware. |
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
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
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-04. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.