Garage vs MinIO: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Amazon S3. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Garage | MinIO | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Storage | Storage |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| GitHub stars | — | 48k |
| Tech stack | Rust | Go |
| Replaces | Amazon S3 | Amazon S3 |
Garage
Distributed, S3-compatible object storage, an alternative to Amazon S3.
Pros
- Excellent for homelab clusters on modest hardware
Things to consider
- Cluster configuration has a bit more of a learning curve
MinIO
S3-compatible object storage, self-hosted.
Pros
- Drop-in S3 replacement, near-frictionless migration
Things to consider
- Real high availability requires several nodes to configure
Key features
Garage
- 100% S3-compatible API
- Built for geo-distributed clusters
- Very low per-node resource usage
MinIO
- 100% S3-compatible API
- Encryption at rest and object versioning
- Multi-site replication