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.
ℹ️ MinIO's community edition is no longer published as a public Docker image: the official repository was archived and the image was pulled from Docker Hub (and from its quay.io mirror too). The last free version still floating around has an unpatched critical authentication vulnerability. We don't recommend deploying MinIO this way until the project offers an official path again — consider another Amazon S3 alternative from this catalog in the meantime.
Pros
- Drop-in S3 replacement, near-frictionless migration
Things to consider
- Real high availability requires several nodes to configure
- Public Docker image pulled (see note above) — not deployable today without an official path
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
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