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/
- sscarduzio
Really happy with my own https://deltaglider.com/
- Filesystem backend
- Encrypted S3 backend
- Compressed S3 backend (Saving a ton of money here)
- Cross backend replication
- Full IAM
- Full GUI with OIDC auth
- 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.