head to head · open source
Ceph vs Spinifex
Ceph has 17,050 GitHub stars, 6,504 forks, 1,353 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Spinifex has 179 stars, 10 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ceph leads on adoption by 9,425% (17,050 vs 179 stars). Ceph is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence; Spinifex is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Ceph has attracted 38% as many forks as stars, Spinifex 6%. 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 | Spinifex | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 179 |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.5K | ⑂ 10 |
| 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 Spinifex if
- You want the Spinifex feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Spinifex fits your workflow better
About Ceph
Ceph is a scalable open source distributed storage system written in C++ and described as a platform for object, block, and file storage. It lives in infrastructure and operations storage solutions, where it provides a shared storage layer across distributed nodes rather than a single local disk.
About Spinifex
Spinifex is an open source, AGPL 3.0 infrastructure platform built by Mulga that recreates the AWS service surface — EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, IAM, ALB/NLB, EKS, ECR, ECS, and RDS — on bare metal, on premises hardware, and edge sites, for teams that need AWS APIs and tooling but cannot or will not run in a hyperscaler cloud.
read the full Spinifex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ceph or Spinifex more popular?
Ceph has 17,050 GitHub stars and Spinifex has 179. Ceph has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ceph and Spinifex free?
Both are open source. Ceph has no licence declared in this registry, and Spinifex is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Ceph and Spinifex?
Ceph is written in C++ and Spinifex in Go. 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 Spinifex?
Choose Ceph if you want the larger community (17,050 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Spinifex if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.