head to head · open source
rclone vs MaterialFiles
rclone has 60,827 GitHub stars, 5,654 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. MaterialFiles has 9,404 stars, 786 forks, 611 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. rclone leads on adoption by 547% (60,827 vs 9,404 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; MaterialFiles is written in Kotlin under GPL-3.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, MaterialFiles 8%. rclone 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
| rclone | MaterialFiles | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Kotlin |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.7K | ⑂ 786 |
| 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 MaterialFiles if
- You want the MaterialFiles feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Kotlin
- You evaluated both and MaterialFiles 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 MaterialFiles
Material Files 本文中文版 An open source Material Design file manager, for Android 5.0+. Help translation on Transifex (Search Android & GNOME translations, Microsoft language resources, MIME type translations) Preview Features Open source: Lightweight, clean and secure. Material Design: Follows Material Design guidelines, with attention into details. Breadcrumbs: Navigate in the filesystem with ease. Root support: View and manage files with root access. Archive support: View, extract and create common compressed files. NAS support: View and manage files on FTP, SFTP, SMB and WebDAV servers. Themes: Customizable UI…
read the full MaterialFiles overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or MaterialFiles more popular?
rclone has 60,827 GitHub stars and MaterialFiles has 9,404. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and MaterialFiles free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and MaterialFiles under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and MaterialFiles?
rclone is written in Go and MaterialFiles in Kotlin. 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 MaterialFiles?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,827 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose MaterialFiles if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.