MinIO alternatives for local S3 dev environments
Original: Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
Why This Matters
MinIO's departure leaves a real gap in open-source data tooling demos; this comparison gives developers a tested shortlist.
After MinIO's parent company abandoned the project in late 2025, developer Robin Moffatt evaluated six S3-compatible alternatives—S3Proxy, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Zenko CloudServer, Garage, and Apache Ozone—for single-node Docker-based deployments, focusing on ease of use, open-source licensing, and active maintenance.
MinIO was the default choice for local S3 emulation in Docker Compose-based demo stacks—until late 2025, when the company behind it walked away to chase other commercial interests. That left a gap in countless developer demos and CI pipelines that relied on it to validate S3 compatibility.
Robin Moffatt, a developer advocate, published a hands-on comparison of six alternatives. His criteria: must ship a Docker image, must be S3-compatible, must be free (preferably Apache 2.0 or similar OSI-approved license), must work cleanly on a single node, and must show signs of active community or commercial backing. Developer experience and documentation quality earned bonus points.
His test setup was a Docker Compose stack pairing DuckDB with an Iceberg REST Catalog, using the S3 layer as backing storage. Each candidate was swapped in to see whether Iceberg-format Parquet files landed correctly. The contenders included RustFS (a Rust-based MinIO fork), the lightweight Garage, Zenko CloudServer, SeaweedFS, S3Proxy, and Apache Ozone. A comparison summary and all code are published in a public repo linked from the post.
The post explicitly excludes multi-node, production, or GUI considerations—it is aimed squarely at developers who used MinIO as a lightweight local stand-in, not as a self-managed production store.