MinIO vs SeaweedFS: 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.
| MinIO | SeaweedFS | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Storage | Storage |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | 48k | 23k |
| Tech stack | Go | Go |
| Replaces | Amazon S3 | Amazon S3 |
MinIO has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
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
SeaweedFS
Distributed storage for millions of files, an alternative to Amazon S3.
Pros
- Excellent performance with massive volumes of small files
Things to consider
- Less polished documentation than MinIO to get started
Key features
MinIO
- 100% S3-compatible API
- Encryption at rest and object versioning
- Multi-site replication
SeaweedFS
- Optimized for small files at scale
- Included S3 compatibility layer
- Configurable replication and erasure coding