MinIO
Top pickThe S3 API on your own hardware — same calls, no egress bill.
92
sovereigntyMinIO 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.
OPEN SOURCEAGPL-3.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseAGPL-3.0
PricingFree and open source. Commercial licence and support available from MinIO Inc.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +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
Where it falls short
- −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
MinIO as an alternative to
Where MinIO shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
MinIO head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.