head to head · open source
Garage vs Alarik
Garage has 4,541 GitHub stars, 176 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Alarik has 538 stars, 6 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Garage leads on adoption by 744% (4,541 vs 538 stars). Garage is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; Alarik is written in Swift under Apache-2.0. Garage has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, Alarik 1%. Garage was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (object-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
| Garage | Alarik | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 4.5K | ★ 538 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-09-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 176 | ⑂ 6 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Garage if
- You weight community size — 4.5K 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 Alarik if
- You want the Alarik feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and Alarik fits your workflow better
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 →
About Alarik
Alarik is a high performance, self hosted S3 compatible object storage system written in Swift and licensed under Apache 2.0, built for developers and platform teams that want an open alternative to MinIO and RustFS.
read the full Alarik overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Garage or Alarik more popular?
Garage has 4,541 GitHub stars and Alarik has 538. Garage has the larger community by that measure.
Are Garage and Alarik free?
Both are open source. Garage is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Alarik under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Garage and Alarik?
Garage is written in Rust and Alarik in Swift. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Garage or Alarik?
Choose Garage if you want the larger community (4,541 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Alarik if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.