head to head · open source
lakeFS vs ZeroFS
lakeFS has 5,575 GitHub stars, 490 forks, 443 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ZeroFS has 3,164 stars, 128 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. lakeFS leads on adoption by 76% (5,575 vs 3,164 stars). lakeFS is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence; ZeroFS is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. lakeFS has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, ZeroFS 4%. lakeFS was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| lakeFS | ZeroFS | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.6K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-01 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 490 | ⑂ 128 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lakeFS if
- You weight community size — 5.6K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ZeroFS if
- You want the ZeroFS 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 ZeroFS fits your workflow better
About lakeFS
lakeFS is Data Version Control (Git for Data) lakeFS is an open source tool that transforms your object storage into a Git like repository. It enables you to manage your data lake the way you manage your code. With lakeFS you can build repeatable, atomic, and versioned data lake operations from complex ETL jobs to data science and analytics. lakeFS supports AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage as its underlying storage service. It is API compatible with S3 and works seamlessly with all modern data frameworks such as Spark, Hive, AWS Athena, DuckDB, and Presto. For more information, see the…
read the full lakeFS overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lakeFS or ZeroFS more popular?
lakeFS has 5,575 GitHub stars and ZeroFS has 3,164. lakeFS has the larger community by that measure.
Are lakeFS and ZeroFS free?
Both are open source. lakeFS has no licence declared in this registry, and ZeroFS is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between lakeFS and ZeroFS?
lakeFS is written in Go and ZeroFS 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, lakeFS or ZeroFS?
Choose lakeFS if you want the larger community (5,575 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose ZeroFS if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.