head to head · open source
Ceph vs Garage
Ceph has 17,193 GitHub stars, 6,555 forks, 1,353 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Garage has 4,812 stars, 185 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. Ceph leads on adoption by 257% (17,193 vs 4,812 stars). Ceph is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence; Garage is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. Ceph has attracted 38% as many forks as stars, Garage 4%. Ceph was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Ceph | Garage | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 185 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ceph if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Garage if
- You want the Garage feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Garage fits your workflow better
About Ceph
Ceph a scalable distributed storage system See for current information about Ceph. Status Contributing Code Most of Ceph is dual licensed under the LGPL version 2.1 or 3.0. Some miscellaneous code is either public domain or licensed under a BSD style license. The Ceph documentation is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 (CC BY SA 3.0). Some headers included in the ceph/ceph repository are licensed under the GPL. See the file COPYING for a full inventory of licenses by file. All code contributions must include a valid "Signed off by" line. See the file SubmittingPatches.rst for details on…
About Garage
Garage === [ Website and documentation Binary releases Git repository Matrix channel ] Garage is an S3 compatible distributed object storage service designed for self hosting at a small to medium scale. Garage is designed for storage clusters composed of nodes running at different physical locations, in order to easily provide a storage service that replicates data at these different locations and stays available even when some servers are unreachable. Garage also focuses on being lightweight, easy to operate, and highly resilient to machine failures. Garage is built by Deuxfleurs, an experimental small scale…
read the full Garage overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ceph or Garage more popular?
Ceph has 17,193 GitHub stars and Garage has 4,812. Ceph has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ceph and Garage free?
Both are open source. Ceph has no licence declared in this registry, and Garage is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Ceph and Garage?
Ceph is written in C++ and Garage in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ceph or Garage?
Choose Ceph if you want the larger community (17,193 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Garage if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.