head to head · open source
seaweedfs vs cubefs
seaweedfs has 35,895 GitHub stars, 3,098 forks, 772 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cubefs has 5,688 stars, 715 forks, 265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. seaweedfs leads on adoption by 531% (35,895 vs 5,688 stars). seaweedfs is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cubefs is written in Go under Apache-2.0. seaweedfs has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cubefs 13%. seaweedfs was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 6 topic tags (distributed-file-system, distributed-storage, erasure-coding, fuse), 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
| seaweedfs | cubefs | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 36K | ★ 5.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 715 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick seaweedfs if
- You weight community size — 36K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cubefs if
- You want the cubefs feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cubefs fits your workflow better
About seaweedfs
SeaweedFS SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives: 1. to store billions of files! 2. to serve the files fast! One weed binary serves an S3 object store, a POSIX file system, and a lakehouse with S3 Tables, all over the same data. Each blob is one disk read away, capacity grows by starting another volume server, and cloud storage can be cached or tiered transparently. Both read and write operations have O(1) complexity and can run at the full speed supported by the underlying hardware. Download Binaries for different platforms Wiki Documentation Community…
read the full seaweedfs overview →
About cubefs
CubeFS Overview CubeFS ("储宝" in Chinese) is an open source cloud native distributed file & object storage system, hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a graduated project. What can you build with CubeFS As an open source distributed storage, CubeFS can serve as your datacenter filesystem, data lake storage infra, and private or hybrid cloud storage. Moreover, it can be run in public cloud services, providing cache acceleration and file system semantics on top of public cloud storage such as S3. In particular, CubeFS enables the separation of storage/compute architecture for databases, search…
read the full cubefs overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is seaweedfs or cubefs more popular?
seaweedfs has 35,895 GitHub stars and cubefs has 5,688. seaweedfs has the larger community by that measure.
Are seaweedfs and cubefs free?
Both are open source. seaweedfs is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cubefs under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between seaweedfs and cubefs?
seaweedfs is written in Go and cubefs 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, seaweedfs or cubefs?
Choose seaweedfs if you want the larger community (35,895 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cubefs if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.