head to head · open source
Filestash vs Garage
Filestash has 14,690 GitHub stars, 1,004 forks, 126 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Garage has 4,541 stars, 176 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Filestash leads on adoption by 223% (14,690 vs 4,541 stars). Filestash is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Garage is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. Filestash has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, Garage 4%. Filestash was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (s3), 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
| Filestash | Garage | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 176 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Filestash if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 Filestash
Filestash is a Go, AGPL 3.0 licensed universal file storage client for enterprise storage. It lives in Infrastructure & Operations / Storage Solutions. It began as a storage agnostic Dropbox like file manager that speaks FTP, SFTP, S3, SMB, WebDAV, IPFS, and about 20 more protocols. It has three products: a browser based web client, native clients for macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iPhone, and gateways for exposing storage over protocols.
read the full Filestash overview →
About Garage
Garage is an S3 compatible distributed object storage service written in Rust and released under the AGPL 3.0, built for self hosting at small to medium scale where the cluster spans nodes in different physical locations.
read the full Garage overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
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Frequently asked questions
Is Filestash or Garage more popular?
Filestash has 14,690 GitHub stars and Garage has 4,541. Filestash has the larger community by that measure.
Are Filestash and Garage free?
Both are open source. Filestash is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Garage under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Filestash and Garage?
Filestash is written in Go 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, Filestash or Garage?
Choose Filestash if you want the larger community (14,690 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Garage if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.