MinIO Alternatives: 5 Picks, $0.015/GB R2 [2026]

MinIO alternatives moved from a nice-to-have list to an urgent migration task in 2026. The project that defined self-hosted S3 stopped maintaining its community server, and secondary reports say the GitHub repository was archived on April 25, 2026. An earlier signal came on February 12, when the README changed to say the project was “no longer maintained” and pointed users toward the commercial AIStor line. If you run a MinIO community binary today, you run software its maker reportedly no longer patches.

This comparison covers the five replacements people evaluate on October 23, 2026: Garage, SeaweedFS, Ceph RGW, RustFS and Cloudflare R2. It also keeps MinIO’s commercial AIStor product in the table as the baseline, because staying put with a paid license is a legitimate answer for some teams. Four of the five options are self-hosted. R2 is the managed outlier, and our look at Cloudflare R2 against S3 and Backblaze B2 goes deeper on the hosted-bucket market.

A note on evidence. Every price, version and date below comes from vendor documentation and release pages fetched this week. Where only one source backed a claim, the text says so. We found no independent head-to-head throughput benchmark for these five, so the benchmark section reports vendor-published claims and labels them that way instead of inventing a leaderboard. The goal is a shortlist you can test in a weekend, not a winner declared from marketing copy.

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What Happened to MinIO’s Open-Source Server

The timeline is short and blunt. On February 12, 2026, the repository README changed to say the project was “no longer maintained” and directed users to AIStor. Multiple secondary reports date the archive and read-only switch to April 25, 2026. Those same reports name RELEASE.2025-10-15T17-29-55Z as the last community server tag. Anything newer ships only under the AIStor name.

Fallout continued through the summer and fall. Third-party reporting says the minio/minio and minio/mc images disappeared from Docker Hub on September 11, and the mc client repository was reportedly archived on July 14. Another report says that on October 6 the download host dl.min.io returned HTTP 410 with a notice that the open-source server, mc and KES projects are archived and carry no support or security advisories. We could not match these items to an official MinIO announcement, so treat each as reported rather than confirmed. The direction of travel is clear regardless.

What MinIO sells now is AIStor. The free tier, AIStor Free, is free under MinIO’s proprietary license and redistribution is prohibited, which makes it a different animal from the old open-source edition. The newest release in the official index is AIStor RELEASE.2026-09-19T17-05-25Z, with fixes for three object-listing paths, Iceberg REST authentication and per-feature licensing. On July 29 the company announced AIStor Memory, an enterprise system for agent memory, workspace and secrets. Secondary sources also report AIStor Tables in February and a context-memory store called MemKV in May.

This is a funded company with a clear strategy, not an abandoned one. Garima Kapoor is co-founder and co-CEO, and the investor list includes AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. On October 18, MinIO reportedly announced a government business built on a pay-as-you-scale model. The product simply points at enterprise AI infrastructure now, not at the self-hoster who wanted a free binary.

One more data point deserves caution. A report dated October 23 referenced a publicly available exploit targeting MinIO storage systems. We could not confirm which builds it affects, so read it as a prompt to check your own exposure, not as a verdict. The practical rule holds either way: if a production cluster runs a community build, put a migration or a paid-license decision on this quarter’s plan.

MinIO Alternatives at a Glance: Specs Compared

The table below puts all six options side by side. Cells hold only facts confirmed on vendor pages fetched on October 23, 2026. Where the evidence is thin, the cell gives a plain description instead of a number. Operational burden and best fit are our own judgment calls and are labeled that way.

Attribute	MinIO AIStor	Garage	SeaweedFS	Ceph RGW	RustFS	Cloudflare R2
What it is	Commercial object store	Lightweight geo-distributed S3 store from Deuxfleurs	Distributed storage with S3 layer, filer and volume servers	Object gateway inside Ceph	Distributed object store written in Rust	Managed cloud object storage
Hosting	Self-host	Self-host	Self-host	Self-host	Self-host	Cloudflare only
License	Proprietary (AIStor Free bars redistribution)	AGPL-3.0	Enterprise edition sold separately	Part of the Ceph project	Apache 2.0	Service terms
Newest release found	RELEASE.2026-09-19T17-05-25Z	v2.4.1	Frequent 4.x releases	Ships inside Ceph releases	1.0.x line, 1.0.0 GA announced Sept. 16	Continuous service, no version
Status on Oct. 23	Active, AI-focused	Active	Active (S3, IAM, STS, Helm work)	Active	Active, post-GA	Active
Community edition	Old server “no longer maintained”	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not applicable
Durability model	Not covered here	Replication across nodes and sites	Tunable erasure coding, 20+4 shown at 1.2x overhead	Ceph pools (replication or erasure coding)	Distributed erasure-coded design	Managed by Cloudflare
Network assumption	Data-center LAN	200 ms or less, 50 Mbps or more	Data-center LAN	Data-center LAN	Data-center LAN	Public internet
Egress fees	Your network bill	Your network bill	Your network bill	Your network bill	Your network bill	None for internet egress
Paid support route	AIStor subscriptions	Community and third-party hosts	SeaweedFS Enterprise	Through Ceph distributors	Pricing page plus support add-on	Cloudflare plans
Backing	Venture-funded company	EU grants (NGI POINTER, NLnet)	Enterprise company plus maintainers	Hosted under the Linux Foundation	Company-backed	Cloudflare
Operational burden (our view)	Low to medium	Low to medium	Medium	High	Medium	None
Best fit (our view)	Teams that will pay	Homelabs, small clusters, multi-site	Many small files, mixed workloads	Existing Ceph shops	MinIO-style drop-in trials	Egress-heavy delivery
Main risk	Vendor lock-in	AGPL review, small-cluster scope	Release churn	Complexity	Young codebase	Cloudflare billing lock-in

Two patterns jump out. First, licenses split the field. Garage’s AGPL-3.0 and RustFS’s Apache 2.0 are both free to self-host, but legal teams treat them differently, and the AGPL network clause matters if you modify the code and expose it to users. Second, operational burden climbs steeply once you leave single-binary tools. Ceph RGW buys scale and flexibility at the price of a storage team.

The “newest release” row hides one real discrepancy. RustFS’s GitHub release page surfaced 1.0.2 (October 16), while its official download site lists 1.0.3 as the newest server release. When two official pages disagree, pin to the version you tested and check both before upgrading.

Garage: The Small-Cluster Pick Under AGPL-3.0

Garage comes from the Deuxfleurs collective, and its quick start documentation reads like it was written by people who run storage on modest hardware. The homepage title says it all: “An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters”. The stable release on October 23 is v2.4.1, dated September 29, and the license is AGPL-3.0, free for self-hosting. One current report describes it as a single static binary, with a Docker image published as dxflrs/garage.

The design target is unusual. Garage’s documentation lists a network envelope of 200 ms or less and 50 Mbps or more, which tells you it expects nodes in different buildings, not racks on one switch. That makes it a natural fit for a team with a few machines in separate offices or a homelab spread over two houses. It replicates data across nodes and sites rather than chasing the efficiency tricks of large clusters. A stack like the one behind the RomM self-hosted ROM manager usually needs one bucket and a few hundred gigabytes, which is exactly the size Garage handles well.

Funding history matters for a project with no commercial parent. Garage’s own site lists three EU grants: NGI POINTER paid for three full-time employees for one year in 2021 to 2022, NLnet and NGI0 Entrust covered one full-time employee in 2023 to 2024, and the NLnet and NGI0 Commons Fund covered 1.5 full-time employees in 2025. Grant money buys steady maintenance but not a support desk. If you need a phone number to call, Garage is the wrong choice unless you buy hosting from a third party.

Third-party hosting exists. Elestio advertises managed Garage from $16 per month with backups, SSL and updates, and Railway shows an estimated $5 to $15 per month depending on storage and compute. Both figures come from single vendor pages dated October 22 and 23, so treat them as ballpark numbers. On packaging, TrueNAS lists v2.4.1 in its Community Apps catalog, and EmberNet bundles it with Garage’s official Helm chart, according to their documentation.

Limits are real. Garage targets small and medium clusters, and teams that need heavy bucket-level features or very large single-site throughput will outgrow it. A compatibility bug between the Databasus backup tool and Garage v2.3.0 was reported fixed on October 22, a reminder to test your exact S3 client calls before cutting over. Run your application’s full request mix against a staging Garage before you trust it with production data.

SeaweedFS: Broad Feature Set With a Fast Release Pace

SeaweedFS is a distributed storage system first and an S3 server second. It ships filer, volume and FUSE components alongside its S3 layer, so one cluster can serve objects and a mounted filesystem. The official site claims full POSIX behavior over FUSE, including hardlinks, permissions and atomic renames. That breadth explains why people evaluating MinIO alternatives keep returning to it.

Release cadence is the headline. Release 4.49 reportedly focused on IAM, OIDC and STS correctness, including rejection of reused OIDC jti claims for replay protection. Fast releases show an active project, though they also mean you need an upgrade process, not a set-and-forget install.

Storage efficiency is where SeaweedFS argues hardest. Its site says “Full protection at 1.2×. Not 3×.” and shows a 20+4 erasure-coding ratio giving full failure protection at 1.2x storage overhead, against 2x to 3x for replication. The math is simple: with 3x replication every byte is stored three times, while at 1.2x overhead the same disks hold far more usable data. New data is also compressed with zstd by default, which the vendor says is typically 10 to 30 percent smaller than gzip and several times faster to decode.

Commercial terms are murky. The site now carries a SeaweedFS Enterprise brand and pricing page, and release pages mention an enterprise-grade 24/7 support add-on, but we could not confirm a published price from an official page. One non-official source quotes a per-terabyte figure, and we are leaving it out until SeaweedFS confirms it. Ask for a quote if support matters. On the ecosystem side, OpenEverest announced initial SeaweedFS provider support on October 6 (provider version 0.1.1), and a third-party mirror of the project wiki shows a Lance catalog and LanceDB integration landing October 19.

Ceph RGW: The Enterprise-Scale Option With a Staffing Bill

Ceph RGW, also called the RADOS Gateway, exposes S3 on top of a Ceph cluster. It is not a separate product. We found no priced RGW plan or edition from Ceph itself, so any support contract comes through a distributor or integrator. The newest development line we could confirm is Tentacle, corresponding to Ceph 20, with official build records continuing through the summer. The project also published a Q3 2026 newsletter on September 29.

Nothing in the evidence suggests RGW is in trouble. The Ceph blog shows regular operations posts, and the build system records repeated Tentacle builds in March, April, May and July. What the evidence cannot give us is a clean list of RGW-specific changes between July 23 and October 23, so we won’t invent one. For a decision, that gap matters less than the architecture. Ceph pools handle block, file and object together, and RGW rides on all of that machinery.

That machinery is the cost. Running Ceph well means monitors, OSD planning, placement groups and upgrade choreography. A two-person team replacing a three-node MinIO setup will spend more time learning Ceph than serving buckets. By contrast, an organization that already runs Ceph for virtual machine disks gets S3 almost for free. This is also where the argument from cloud repatriation to dedicated servers lands. Companies moving storage off hyperscalers onto owned hardware often have the staff for Ceph, and the per-terabyte economics reward them for it.

Choose RGW when you need multi-protocol storage, expect to grow well past a handful of nodes, and can dedicate engineers to it. Skip it when the goal is simply to get an S3 endpoint running by Friday. For that job, one of the single-binary options will save weeks.

RustFS: The Apache 2.0 Challenger Courting MinIO Users

RustFS aims straight at MinIO’s abandoned audience. Its site describes a fast-growing distributed object store built in Rust under Apache 2.0, and one official line promises “Apache 2.0 licensed, business-friendly, and free of vendor lock-in.” Another says it combines Rust-native engineering, Apache 2.0 licensing and S3 compatibility “for AI infrastructure and direct MinIO migrations.” The 1.0.0 GA announcement is dated September 16, 2026, and calls the core engine production-ready.

Post-GA activity has been intense. Release 1.0.1 arrived first, followed by 1.0.2 and, per the official download site, 1.0.3 after that. The project itself reported more than 32,000 GitHub stars and over 2.7 million deployed instances at GA. Those are self-reported figures we could not verify independently. The vendor’s beta.10 post also claims the build outperformed MinIO across PUT workloads, which is a claim about a beta, not the GA release.

Young code shows its age in the issue tracker. A vulnerability letting a writer overwrite an existing object version without DeleteObjectVersion permission was disclosed, and the project says the fix shipped in 1.0.2. A sustained multipart-PUT memory-growth issue reported against 1.0.0 on September 30 was still under investigation on October 17, according to the issue discussion. Users also reported that 1.0.1 with updated Docker images fixed at least one metadata-enumeration stall.

None of that disqualifies RustFS. Every object store goes through this phase. It does mean RustFS belongs in staging and in non-critical buckets first, with upgrades tracked weekly. If your main concern is license risk and you want the closest conceptual match to old MinIO, it deserves a trial. If your concern is a decade of battle-tested behavior, look at Ceph or SeaweedFS instead.

Cloudflare R2: The Managed Alternative With No Internet Egress

R2 is not a self-hosted MinIO replacement, and Cloudflare does not offer a downloadable edition. It is strongly consistent, S3-compatible object storage on Cloudflare’s network, and it belongs in this comparison because many teams ran MinIO only to dodge cloud egress bills. In 2021, then Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince framed the pitch in the R2 launch announcement: “Since AWS launched S3, cloud storage has attracted, and then locked in, developers with exorbitant egress fees.” Five years on, internet egress from R2 is still free.

Recent changes are mostly about the platform around R2. On October 1, Cloudflare renamed R2 Data Catalog and R2 SQL to Basin Catalog and Basin SQL as part of the Basin launch, an Iceberg-based data platform built on R2. On October 2, Cloudflare said generally available features that launched for Enterprise customers that week were also open to pay-as-you-go accounts, with most on the free tier. It also said hard spending caps were still being prototyped, with early availability planned for Q4 2026. That is a stated plan, not a shipped feature.

Performance news came from an October 23 Cloudflare post on its cache rebuild. R2, as Cloudflare’s largest internal user of the new implementation, saw p99 time to first byte fall by roughly half, and a follow-up change cut tiered-cache traffic for R2 and similar workloads by about 6 percent. Cloudflare measured this on its own network, so you cannot reproduce it from your data center. Reportedly R2 also gained a US data-residency jurisdiction on October 9, which matters for compliance reviews but should be confirmed in the docs before you rely on it.

The tradeoff is lock-in of a different kind. You swap software risk for billing and platform risk, and you give up on-premises placement. For public assets, backups with rare reads and data you move between regions often, R2 is hard to beat on simplicity. For air-gapped or sovereignty-bound data, pick one of the self-hosted four.

Benchmarks: What Vendors Claim and What Nobody Has Verified

Here is the honest state of play. No independent lab has published a controlled, same-hardware comparison of Garage, SeaweedFS, Ceph RGW and RustFS that we could verify this week. What exists are vendor claims from four official sources: RustFS, SeaweedFS, MinIO and Cloudflare. They answer different questions, so lining them up as a ranking would mislead you. The table sorts each claim by what it actually measures.

Claim	Source	What it measures	Caveat
Outperforms MinIO across PUT workloads	RustFS beta.10 post	Write throughput	Beta build, methodology not shown on the page
Full protection at 1.2x overhead (20+4) versus 2x to 3x replication	SeaweedFS site	Capacity efficiency	Design math, not speed
zstd default, 10 to 30 percent smaller than gzip	SeaweedFS site	Compression ratio and decode speed	Vendor claim, workload dependent
p99 time to first byte down by about half, tiered-cache traffic down about 6 percent	Cloudflare blog, Oct. 23	Read latency and cache traffic	Measured on Cloudflare’s network only
GPU utilization above 95 percent, cost per token cut by about 50 percent	MinIO site	AI inference context memory	Not object-store throughput
Network target of 200 ms or less and 50 Mbps or more	Garage documentation	Deployment envelope	A requirement, not a benchmark

Read the table as a checklist of questions to ask, not answers. Does your workload hammer small objects or stream large ones? Is write throughput or first-byte latency your pain point? Do you care more about raw speed or usable terabytes per dollar of disk? Each vendor shines on the axis it chose to publish. For broader context on how we treat vendor numbers across cloud coverage, see our cloud computing section.

Build your own test instead. Run the same client, the same network and the same disks against each candidate. Use three object-size bands (small objects around 4 KiB, mid-size around 1 MiB and large objects around 64 MiB), and test PUT, GET, LIST and DELETE separately. Add a failure drill: pull a disk, then a node, and record how long reads stall and how long repair takes. Log p50, p95 and p99 latency, not just averages, and repeat each run at least three times.

Also test the boring features that break migrations. Multipart uploads, presigned URLs, versioning, lifecycle rules, object lock, bucket notifications and IAM policy syntax all differ between S3-compatible servers. A candidate that wins on throughput but silently ignores a lifecycle rule will cost you more than a slower one that honors it. Write the feature list down before the test, and tick it off per product.

Pricing and Total Cost: Licenses at $0, R2 at $0.015 per GB

Cloudflare publishes the cleanest price list of the group, so the table starts there. The self-hosted rows show license cost only. Your real bill for those options is hardware, power, bandwidth and engineer time, none of which any vendor can quote for you.

Item	Price or terms
R2 Standard storage	$0.015 per GB-month
R2 Infrequent Access storage	$0.01 per GB-month
R2 Standard Class A operations	$4.50 per million requests
R2 Standard Class B operations	$0.36 per million requests
R2 Infrequent Access Class A / Class B	$9.00 / $0.90 per million requests
R2 Infrequent Access retrieval	$0.01 per GB
R2 internet egress	No egress fee
Basin Catalog operations	$9 per million
Basin Catalog compaction	$0.005 per GB and $2 per million objects processed
Basin SQL (formerly R2 SQL)	$0.0025 per GB scanned ($2.50 per TB), 10 GB included monthly
MinIO AIStor Free	$0 license, proprietary, no redistribution
Garage	$0 license (AGPL-3.0)
RustFS	$0 license (Apache 2.0) for self-operated use, paid support available
SeaweedFS Enterprise, MinIO subscriptions, RustFS support	Pricing pages exist, request a quote
Ceph RGW	No separately priced RGW product confirmed

Now some arithmetic from those published R2 rates, ignoring the free tier. Ten terabytes of Standard storage (10,000 GB) costs $150 per month. A hundred terabytes costs $1,500. The same ten terabytes in Infrequent Access costs $100, though retrieval adds $0.01 per GB and the minimum storage duration is 30 days. A busy month with 10 million writes and 100 million reads adds $45 and $36. So 10 TB with that traffic lands near $231 per month, with no egress line at all. Compare that with the Backblaze B2, Wasabi and S3 per-terabyte gap before you commit.

Self-hosting needs a different formula. Monthly cost per usable terabyte equals amortized hardware plus power plus network plus staff time, divided by usable capacity. The durability scheme moves the denominator a lot. Three-way replication stores every byte three times, while a 1.2x erasure-coded layout stores each byte 1.2 times, so the same raw disk yields much more usable capacity. That can cut your per-terabyte cost sharply before you count a single license fee.

Staff time usually dominates for small teams. If a replacement saves you $100 a month in storage but costs four hours of on-call attention, a managed bucket wins. If you store hundreds of terabytes and already employ storage engineers, owned hardware wins by a wide margin. Secondary reporting says MinIO’s Enterprise Lite tier, announced December 2025, covers deployments up to 400 TiB, but we could not confirm that on an official page, so verify it on MinIO’s pricing page before planning around it.

Real-World Signals: Who Is Actually Running These

Case studies are scarce for fresh projects, so we looked for dated adoption evidence instead. Each item below comes from a vendor or ecosystem page checked this week, and single-source items are flagged.

• TrueNAS lists Garage v2.4.1. The Community Apps catalog record was updated October 21 and its metadata October 22, which puts Garage one click away for homelab and small-office NAS owners.
• EmberNet packages Garage 2.4.1 with the official Helm chart. The documentation is dated October 22 and shows Garage entering Kubernetes app stores.
• OpenEverest added SeaweedFS as a provider. The October 6 announcement covers provisioning and management through a UI or API, with provider version 0.1.1.
• MinIO won a partner award at Databricks. MinIO’s own site says it was named 2026 Databricks ISV Storage Partner of the Year, and it promoted AIStor Table Sharing for on-premises Delta and Iceberg tables on October 22 and 23.
• Cloudflare built Basin on R2. The Iceberg-based platform reached general availability on October 1, according to a single news report, and the Data Catalog rename to Basin Catalog is confirmed in Cloudflare’s changelog.
• Garage survives on grants. Three EU-funded programs paid for staff between 2021 and 2025, which shows steady if modest support.
• RustFS patched a version-overwrite flaw within a day. The fix reportedly landed in 1.0.2 on October 19, one day after disclosure.
• Databasus fixed a Garage v2.3.0 incompatibility. The issue was reported fixed October 22, per a single issue-tracker report.

The pattern is consistent. Garage spreads through packaging channels aimed at small operators. SeaweedFS spreads through platform integrations. MinIO leans into enterprise data partnerships, and Cloudflare folds R2 into a broader data stack. RustFS shows the fastest raw activity but also the most visible growing pains. Adoption evidence for Ceph RGW did not surface in this week’s sources, which says more about how quiet mature infrastructure is than about its health.

Use-Case Recommendations: Which MinIO Alternative Fits Which Job

Homelab or small office. Pick Garage. It runs as a single binary, ships in the TrueNAS catalog and tolerates links between sites. Expect a weekend of setup, not a month. Keep the AGPL license in mind only if you plan to modify and host it for outside users.

Platform team that needs S3 for internal tools. Observability and backup stacks often want a bucket for logs, traces and snapshots. A self-hosted tool such as the one in our Langfuse self-hosting walkthrough is a typical consumer. SeaweedFS fits when you also want a shared filesystem, and Garage fits when you only want buckets and minimal care.

Large organization already running Ceph. Turn on RGW. You already pay the operational tax, and the incremental cost of S3 is small. Starting Ceph only for object storage rarely pays off unless you expect multi-protocol growth.

Public downloads, media and cross-region data movement. Choose R2. The absence of internet egress fees removes the main cost driver of the workload. You also skip patching entirely. Check the US jurisdiction option and your compliance needs before moving regulated data.

Teams that want the closest thing to old MinIO without a license fee. Trial RustFS in staging. Its Apache 2.0 license and explicit migration positioning make it the natural candidate, but pin versions and watch the issue tracker until the 1.0.x line settles.

AI and lakehouse workloads. This is where options diverge. MinIO’s AIStor targets the space directly, with Iceberg and Delta features and a Databricks partnership. Cloudflare answers with Basin on R2. On the open-source side, SeaweedFS is adding catalog features and RustFS markets itself to AI workloads. If you need those features supported today, pay for AIStor or use Basin. If you can wait, watch the open-source projects.

Teams that will pay for MinIO anyway. Staying on AIStor is rational if your engineers depend on its feature set and your budget allows a subscription. Just stop running unmaintained community builds. Treat the license as a cost, not a surprise.

Migration Guide: Moving Buckets Off MinIO in Five Stages

Migration risk sits in the details, not in the byte copy. The sequence below works for any of the self-hosted targets and for R2. Budget a staging dry run first, then a production run during a quiet window.

Stage 1 and 2: Inventory and Target Setup

List every bucket with its size, object count, versioning state, lifecycle rules, object lock settings, event notifications and access policies. Record which applications use path-style or virtual-hosted addressing, and which use presigned URLs. Then stand up the target. For Garage, a minimal bring-up looks like this, with names as placeholders. Check the quick start for the flags in your version.

garage status
garage layout assign -z dc1 -c 2T NODE_ID
garage layout apply --version 1
garage bucket create media
garage key create app-key
garage bucket allow --read --write --owner media --key app-key

A starter configuration for a single node follows. Replace the secret, paths and addresses, and raise the replication factor on real multi-node clusters.

metadata_dir = "/var/lib/garage/meta"
data_dir = "/var/lib/garage/data"
db_engine = "lmdb"
replication_factor = 1
rpc_bind_addr = "[::]:3901"
rpc_public_addr = "127.0.0.1:3901"
rpc_secret = "REPLACE_WITH_64_HEX_CHARS"

[s3_api]
s3_region = "garage"
api_bind_addr = "[::]:3900"

Stage 3 and 4: Copy, Verify and Dual-Run

rclone handles the transfer well because it speaks S3 on both ends and verifies checksums. Define one remote per side, sync, then run a one-way check. Repeat the sync until the delta is small.

rclone config create minio-old s3 provider=Minio endpoint=https://minio.internal:9000 access_key_id=OLDKEY secret_access_key=OLDSECRET
rclone config create new-store s3 provider=Other endpoint=https://s3.new.internal:3900 region=garage access_key_id=NEWKEY secret_access_key=NEWSECRET
rclone sync minio-old:media new-store:media --checksum --transfers 16 --checkers 32 --progress
rclone check minio-old:media new-store:media --one-way

While the copy runs, point a staging copy of each application at the new endpoint and replay real traffic. Watch for signature errors, multipart failures and listing differences. Then enable dual writes if your application supports them, so the new store stays current until cutover.

Stage 5: Cutover and Rollback

Freeze writes, run a final delta sync, switch the endpoint through DNS or configuration, then unfreeze. Keep the old cluster read-only for at least two weeks, but keep it off the public internet given the exploit report above. If you decide a managed bucket suits you better than self-hosting, our Backblaze B2, Google Cloud and Azure Blob price comparison shows the per-terabyte options. The same rclone commands work with a different remote.

Pros and Cons of Each MinIO Alternative

• Garage pros: tiny footprint, AGPL-3.0 at no cost, built for scattered sites, easy packaging on TrueNAS and Helm. Cons: no commercial support from the project, aimed at small and medium clusters, AGPL needs legal review for some firms.
• SeaweedFS pros: object plus filesystem in one system, tunable erasure coding, rapid feature work in IAM, OIDC and STS. Cons: fast release churn, unclear enterprise pricing, a larger moving-part count than Garage.
• Ceph RGW pros: mature platform, multi-protocol storage, strong at large scale, backed by a Linux Foundation project. Cons: heavy operations, steep learning curve, no priced RGW plan from the project itself.
• RustFS pros: Apache 2.0 license, explicit MinIO migration focus, GA announced September 16, very active development. Cons: young codebase, a security fix and a memory-growth report within weeks of GA, version discrepancy between release channels.
• Cloudflare R2 pros: no internet egress fees, no servers to run, published prices, strong consistency. Cons: cannot run on premises, platform lock-in, hard spending caps still planned rather than shipped.
• MinIO AIStor pros: commercial vendor, active releases, AI and Iceberg features, partner ecosystem. Cons: proprietary license, free tier bars redistribution, community edition abandoned.

Verdict: Garage for Small, R2 for Managed, Ceph for Scale

There is no single winner among MinIO alternatives, and anyone who names one without your workload is guessing. The data does support a clear decision tree. Under a handful of nodes with modest data, Garage v2.4.1 is the safest self-hosted pick today. It has a stable release, a permissive-enough license for most users and active packaging. For hosted simplicity and free internet egress, R2 wins, and its published rates make cost forecasting easy: $150 per month per 10 TB of Standard storage before requests.

At large scale with staff to match, Ceph RGW remains the serious option, and SeaweedFS is the contender if you want object and file together and can manage fast upgrades. RustFS is the one to watch. Its Apache 2.0 license and 1.0 GA announcement make it attractive, but the October security fix and open memory issue say it needs another quarter of hardening before it holds your only copy of important data.

Our action list for this week is short. Inventory every MinIO community build you run. Pick two candidates from the shortlist. Run the test matrix from the benchmark section, including the failure drill. Move non-critical buckets first. The cost of waiting grows with every month your cluster goes unpatched, and the cost of a careful migration is a few engineer-days.

FAQ: MinIO Alternatives in 2026

Is MinIO still open source? The original community server is not maintained. Its README changed on February 12, 2026 to say it was “no longer maintained.” MinIO’s current free offering, AIStor Free, uses a proprietary license and prohibits redistribution.

What is the best MinIO alternative? It depends on size and staffing. Garage suits small clusters, Ceph RGW suits large teams, RustFS targets MinIO-style migrations under Apache 2.0, SeaweedFS covers object plus filesystem needs and Cloudflare R2 covers managed storage.

Is Garage a drop-in replacement for MinIO? It speaks the S3 API, but you must test the exact features your applications use. A Garage v2.3.0 incompatibility with one backup tool was reported fixed in October, which shows why testing matters. The current stable release is v2.4.1 under AGPL-3.0.

Is RustFS production-ready? The project announced 1.0.0 GA on September 16, 2026 and describes the core engine as production-ready under Apache 2.0. Users should upgrade to 1.0.2 or later. Stage it first and track releases closely.

Does Cloudflare R2 charge egress fees? No. Internet egress is free, while storage costs $0.015 per GB-month for Standard and $0.01 for Infrequent Access. Operations are billed separately, at $4.50 per million Class A and $0.36 per million Class B requests on Standard.

Can Ceph RGW work for a small team? It can, but the operational load is high compared with single-binary tools. RGW is still part of the actively built Ceph project, and it fits best where Ceph already runs.

How do I migrate buckets safely? Inventory features first, copy with a checksum-verifying tool such as rclone, test applications against the new endpoint in staging, run a final delta sync and keep the old cluster read-only for a rollback window.