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Best Self-Hosted Amazon S3 Alternatives in 2026

Amazon S3 is a scalable object storage service by AWS for storing and retrieving any amount of data.

7 Self-Hosted Alternatives to Amazon S3

Why Look for Amazon S3 Alternatives?

Amazon S3 is a scalable object storage service by AWS for storing and retrieving any amount of data.

Self-hosted alternatives give you full data ownership, predictable costs, and zero vendor lock-in. You run the software on your own infrastructure and control everything.

7 Best Open-Source Alternatives to Amazon S3

minio

MinIO is a high-performance, S3 compatible object store for AI, data lakes, and cloud environments. — 60,488 GitHub stars. Licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Read full minio review

ceph

Distributed object, block, and file storage. — 16,340 GitHub stars. Licensed under Open Source.

Read full ceph review

SlateDB

SlateDB is an embedded storage engine that leverages object storage for durability, scalability, and simplified replication without the need for disk management. — 2,770 GitHub stars. Licensed under Apache-2.0.

Read full SlateDB review

Storj

Decentralized, affordable, secure cloud object storage. — 3,234 GitHub stars. Licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Read full Storj review

Garage

S3-compatible object store for self-hosted geo-distributed deployments — 3,199 GitHub stars. Licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Read full Garage review

Vanguard

Vanguard offers powerful, community-driven backup solutions for servers and applications, with support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and file backups. — 38 GitHub stars. Licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Read full Vanguard review

SwiftStack

NVIDIA: Pioneering AI, graphics, and computing. — 2,758 GitHub stars. Licensed under Apache-2.0.

Read full SwiftStack review

Why Self-Host Instead of Amazon S3?

  • Data ownership. Your data stays on your server, not on Amazon S3’s infrastructure.
  • Predictable costs. Pay a fixed VPS cost instead of growing per-user or per-usage fees.
  • No vendor lock-in. Export and migrate your data anytime. You control the database.
  • GDPR and compliance. Hosting your own tools simplifies data residency and compliance requirements.

Why teams switch from Amazon S3

  • Data ownership. Your data stays on your server -- not on Amazon S3's infrastructure.
  • Predictable costs. Pay a fixed VPS cost instead of growing per-user or per-usage fees.
  • No vendor lock-in. Export and migrate your data anytime. You control the database.
  • GDPR and compliance. Hosting your own tools simplifies data residency and compliance requirements.

Browse more File Management & Sharing tools

Explore 133 open-source file management & sharing tools you can self-host.

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