MinIO's reign as the go-to local S3 server is over: these 7 alternatives actually work
Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
After MinIO changed its license, developers are hunting for a single-node S3 replacement. I tested seven options—S3Proxy, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Zenko CloudServer, Garage, Apache Ozone, and Ceph—by swapping them into a real Docker Compose project. S3Proxy and SeaweedFS were the easiest drop-ins. Garage and Ozone demanded heavy configuration, while RustFS is still alpha with a recent security vulnerability.
Garage does work, but gosh…it is not just a drop-in replacement in terms of code changes. It requires different plumbing for initialisation, and it's not simple at that either.
- cadamsdotcom
> 2026-03-02: Ruohang Feng has forked MinIO to pgsty/minio and is promising to maintain a stable, CVE-patched, distribution.
This is what I went with.
I use it in end to end tests as an S3 simulator that starts and stops instantly and reads & writes to a local directory, - as you'd expect it's great in that role. No complaints. Given the fork's maintainer puts their real name on it & stakes their reputation, you'd assume it can be trusted - but my use case is simpler than most.
- pveierland
Garage added an automatic configuration feature in v2.3.0 that makes it easier to set up single nodes:
garage server --single-node --default-bucket
- c0balt
A notable mention should also be Versity GW, https://github.com/versity/versitygw/
- KronisLV
Running Sentry on prem, I had to swap out their default SeaweedFS setup for Garage because the former kept failing under concurrent writes. I tried digging around for a bit, but found that the swap was easier and faster, Garage has also worked great for single node use cases (e.g. tested up to around 10 TB of data). I still think that SeaweedFS is a cool project, might have been a config issue or something, wasn’t worth tweaking.
The setup for Garage sucks, especially cause their Docker image doesn’t automatically create keys or buckets and permissions for you like for example various RDBMS images do. Doing that the first time manually was annoying, but their docs are pretty nice and an AI agent can build you your own Docker image with custom init in about 15 minutes.
Worst with it I’ve had were issues with hooking up WinSCP to it directly to browse saved satellite data, initial connections would hang for some reason, not sure what the problem was either.
Also used Zenko but kinda got the feeling that the project wasn’t as healthy and straight up felt abandoned (e.g. the outdated container images and such), though there is some activity.
- uroni
My https://github.com/uroni/hs5 is designed for this use case.
One notable thing is that compared to MinIO (and others) it does not store the objects as individual files. I also have DuckDB directly integrated.
The readme has a comparison to Garage, seaweedfs, RustFS and Ceph.
- mickael-kerjean
Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) has a s3 gateway plugin that I made. It proxy the S3 traffic to any downstream storage: SFTP, FTP, another S3, SMB, NFS, IPFS, ...
- Jedd
A weird target, the author has.
The title is 'for single node local S3' but what they actually mean is 'for minio-compatibility', which is an entirely different question.
When I abandoned minio a year or so ago, I also surveyed the options, and settled on Garage. It lacked the GUI, but felt about the same complexity as minio. Perhaps a smidge more complexity, as I moved to 3-node and 5-node separate instances of garage, running as containers under Nomad.
I don't recall it being onerous, but I was looking for some basic S3-alike capabilities, not just minio-alike.
(How many people set out to build an object storage system with some number of AWS S3 primitives, but primarily try to match a third-party proprietary system's foibles?)
> So, Garage does work, but gosh…it is not just a drop-in replacement in terms of code changes.
I think in terms of actual code that uses local S3, it pretty much was a drop-in replacement. (I have multiple distribution/registry, Grafana Loki / Mimir, influx3 - all backing onto my object storage system, and the config changes there were modest - key+secret, and url - just as you'd expect.)
- alexpotato
We ran RustFS in production at a past job.
Was the backend for an archiving service and we found it to work well on baremetal machines and seamlessly integrated with existing services that used the S3 api.
This was on an internal network so YMMV when it comes to running on the open internet especially with the CVE mentioned in the post.