head to head · open source
rclone vs cryfs
rclone has 60,780 GitHub stars, 5,646 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cryfs has 2,330 stars, 174 forks, 154 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. rclone leads on adoption by 2,509% (60,780 vs 2,330 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; cryfs is written in Rust under LGPL-3.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cryfs 7%. rclone was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (cloud-storage, dropbox, encryption, fuse-filesystem), 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
| rclone | cryfs | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | MIT | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.6K | ⑂ 174 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rclone if
- You weight community size — 61K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cryfs if
- You want the cryfs feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and cryfs fits your workflow better
About rclone
Website Documentation Download Contributing Changelog Installation Forum Rclone Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers. Storage providers 1Fichier :page facing up: Akamai Netstorage :page facing up: Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Object Storage System (OSS) :page facing up: Amazon S3 :page facing up: ArvanCloud Object Storage (AOS) :page facing up: Bizfly Cloud Simple Storage :page facing up: Backblaze B2 :page facing up: Box :page facing up: Ceph :page facing up: China Mobile Ecloud Elastic Object Storage (EOS) :page…
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About cryfs
CryFS 2.0 (Alpha) ⚠️ ALPHA VERSION WARNING ⚠️ CryFS 2.0 alpha is experimental software. You WILL lose your data. Do not use it for anything important. For stable CryFS, please use CryFS 1.0. You can find installation instructions for the stable version here. CryFS 2.0 is in an alpha stage that has not undergone extensive testing. Use it only for testing purposes and please report any issues in the GitHub issue tracker. What is CryFS? CryFS encrypts your files so you can safely store them in cloud storage services like Dropbox, iCloud, or OneDrive. Unlike other encryption tools that encrypt files individually…
read the full cryfs overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or cryfs more popular?
rclone has 60,780 GitHub stars and cryfs has 2,330. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and cryfs free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and cryfs under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and cryfs?
rclone is written in Go and cryfs 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, rclone or cryfs?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,780 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cryfs if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.