Garage vs SeaweedFS
Both are alternatives to Amazon S3. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as SeaweedFS 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.
SeaweedFS
Built for billions of small files, where most object stores struggle.
SeaweedFS is a distributed file and object store designed around a specific weakness in the others: enormous numbers of small files. Its architecture keeps metadata lookups fast where conventional object stores slow down, which makes it a strong fit for image, thumbnail and document workloads at scale. Apache-2.0, around 34k stars, with an S3-compatible gateway and tiered storage to cloud back-ends. It is less known than MinIO and that is the main caution — fewer worked examples when something goes wrong.
Side by side
| Garage | SeaweedFS | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 95 | 93 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Pricing | Free and open source. Designed for commodity and second-hand hardware. | Free and open source. You supply the hardware. |
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
SeaweedFS
Strengths
- +Handles billions of small files where other object stores degrade
- +Apache-2.0 — more permissive than MinIO's AGPL
- +S3-compatible gateway plus a real filesystem interface
- +Tiered storage to cloud back-ends for cold data
Trade-offs
- −Smaller community and fewer worked examples than MinIO
- −More moving parts — master, volume and filer servers
- −Documentation is thinner
- −Less battle-tested at enterprise scale
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Facts verified 2026-08-04. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.