RustFS vs SeaweedFS vs Garage: Which MinIO Alternative Should You Pick?

MinIO is effectively dead. In December 2025, the project entered "maintenance mode" — no new features, no PR reviews, not even guaranteed security patches. Before that, the web UI got stripped out and locked behind a $96K/year enterprise license. If you're running MinIO today, you're on borrowed time.

The good news? Three serious contenders have stepped up: RustFS, SeaweedFS, and Garage. All three are S3-compatible, all three are open-source, and all three are available on Elestio for one-click deployment. But they're built for very different use cases.

Let's break down which one fits your stack.

The Quick Overview

RustFS — The Speed Demon

RustFS is the newest player, and it's making noise. Built entirely in Rust, it claims 2.3x faster performance than MinIO for small object payloads (4KB). The entire binary is under 100MB, and it runs anywhere — from ARM devices to full data centers.

The killer feature? Drop-in binary replacement for MinIO. You can literally swap your MinIO binary with RustFS and keep your existing data, buckets, and configurations. No migration scripts, no downtime planning.

RustFS ships with full S3 compatibility, object versioning, WORM compliance, server-side encryption, and multi-site replication. And it's Apache 2.0 licensed — no AGPL surprises.

The catch: RustFS is still in alpha. The official docs explicitly say "do NOT use in production environments." It's growing fast (24K GitHub stars already), but if you need battle-tested reliability today, you'll want to wait.

Pick RustFS if: You're planning your migration now but deploying in 6-12 months, or you need a MinIO-compatible development environment today.

SeaweedFS — The Production Workhorse

SeaweedFS has been around since 2015, and it shows — in the best way. Written in Go, it handles billions of files with O(1) disk access. That's not a typo. Regardless of how many objects you store, lookup time stays constant.

The architecture is elegant: a master server handles metadata while volume servers store actual data. Small files get packed into larger volumes, which is why SeaweedFS absolutely dominates MinIO for small-file workloads. For large objects (20MB+), MinIO was historically faster, but SeaweedFS has been closing that gap.

Beyond S3, SeaweedFS gives you POSIX FUSE mounts, WebDAV, Hadoop integration, erasure coding, cloud tiering to AWS/GCP/Azure, and a Kubernetes CSI driver. It's the Swiss Army knife of object storage.

The project hit a major milestone when Kubeflow Pipelines officially replaced MinIO with SeaweedFS as its default storage backend. That's serious production validation.

Pick SeaweedFS if: You need a battle-tested, production-ready MinIO replacement today — especially if you're dealing with billions of small files or need features beyond pure S3.

Garage — The Geo-Distribution Specialist

Garage takes a completely different approach. Built by Deuxfleurs, a French self-hosting collective, it's designed specifically for clusters spread across multiple physical locations.

Where RustFS and SeaweedFS optimize for raw performance in a single data center, Garage optimizes for resilience across geography. It automatically splits files, replicates them, and distributes pieces across nodes. If one server goes down — even an entire site — your data stays available.

Garage's footprint is tiny. It runs happily on a Raspberry Pi or a cheap VPS, making it perfect for hobbyists and small organizations who want to spread storage across a home server, a friend's NAS, and a cloud VPS.

The trade-off? Garage uses AGPL v3 licensing, which may complicate things if you're embedding it in proprietary software. And it's intentionally designed for small-to-medium scale — if you're storing petabytes, look elsewhere.

Pick Garage if: You want self-hosted storage distributed across multiple locations (home, office, cloud) with automatic replication and you're working at small-to-medium scale.

How to Deploy on Elestio

All three are available on Elestio with one-click deployment:

• RustFS on Elestio — Starting at $16/month (2 CPU, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB NVMe)
• SeaweedFS on Elestio — Starting at $16/month
• Garage on Elestio — Starting at $16/month

Select your service, pick a provider and region, and click Deploy. Elestio handles SSL, backups, updates, and monitoring — so you can focus on your data, not your infrastructure.

For custom domain setup with automated SSL, follow the official Elestio documentation.

Watch Out For

Before you migrate, a few things to keep in mind:

• S3 compatibility isn't always 100%. All three support the core S3 API, but edge cases (multipart upload quirks, specific IAM policies) can differ. Test your application's S3 calls against the new backend before going live.
• RustFS is alpha software. Despite the hype, the project explicitly warns against production use. Don't bet your data on it yet — use it in dev/staging environments and track the roadmap.
• Garage's replication factor must match your node count. If you're running three nodes, you set replication to three. This is different from MinIO's erasure coding approach — plan your cluster topology accordingly.
• Licensing matters. SeaweedFS and RustFS are Apache 2.0 (embed freely). Garage is AGPL v3 — if you distribute software that includes Garage, you'll need to release your source code too.

For a deeper dive on the MinIO situation and other alternatives (including Ceph RGW), check out our earlier article: MinIO Is in Maintenance Mode: Your Guide to S3-Compatible Storage Alternatives.

The Bottom Line

There's no single "best" MinIO replacement — it depends on what you're building:

• Migrating from MinIO with minimal effort? Start with RustFS (but keep it in staging until it hits stable).
• Need production storage today, at scale? Go with SeaweedFS. It's the most mature, most feature-rich, and already trusted by projects like Kubeflow.
• Running a distributed homelab or multi-site setup? Garage was literally built for your use case.

The MinIO era is over. The good news? What's replacing it is better, faster, and genuinely open-source.

Thanks for reading ❤️ See you in the next one 👋