head to head · open source
ZeroFS vs cloudserver
ZeroFS has 3,164 GitHub stars, 128 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. cloudserver has 1,955 stars, 258 forks, 113 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ZeroFS leads on adoption by 62% (3,164 vs 1,955 stars). ZeroFS is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; cloudserver is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0. ZeroFS has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, cloudserver 13%. cloudserver was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cloud-storage), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| ZeroFS | cloudserver | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 3.2K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 128 | ⑂ 258 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ZeroFS if
- You weight community size — 3.2K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cloudserver if
- You want the cloudserver feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and cloudserver fits your workflow better
About ZeroFS
Documentation Quickstart ZeroFS is a log structured filesystem for S3 ZeroFS serves S3 compatible buckets as POSIX filesystems over NFS and 9P, and as raw block devices over NBD. All three servers run in a single userspace process. Data is compressed and encrypted before upload. ZeroFS differentiates itself from other "filesystem on S3" projects by: Being POSIX conformant Reaching near raw S3 throughput on large files, and scaling to workloads of hundreds of millions of small files Handling tens of thousands of requests per second Requiring no external database service (everything is stored on S3) Being well…
read the full ZeroFS overview →
About cloudserver
Zenko CloudServer [![Docker Pulls][badgedocker]]( [![Docker Pulls][badgetwitter]]( Overview CloudServer (formerly S3 Server) is an open source Amazon S3 compatible object storage server that is part of Zenko, Scality’s Open Source Multi Cloud Data Controller. CloudServer provides a single AWS S3 API interface to access multiple backend data storage both on premise or public in the cloud. CloudServer is useful for Developers, either to run as part of a continous integration test environment to emulate the AWS S3 service locally or as an abstraction layer to develop object storage enabled application on the go…
read the full cloudserver overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ZeroFS or cloudserver more popular?
ZeroFS has 3,164 GitHub stars and cloudserver has 1,955. ZeroFS has the larger community by that measure.
Are ZeroFS and cloudserver free?
Both are open source. ZeroFS is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cloudserver under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ZeroFS and cloudserver?
ZeroFS is written in Rust and cloudserver in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, ZeroFS or cloudserver?
Choose ZeroFS if you want the larger community (3,164 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cloudserver if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.