head to head · open source
rclone vs Spacedrive
rclone has 60,740 GitHub stars, 5,640 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Spacedrive has 39,386 stars, 1,370 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. rclone leads on adoption by 54% (60,740 vs 39,386 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; Spacedrive is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Spacedrive 3%. rclone was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (encryption), 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
| rclone | Spacedrive | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 39K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.6K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 Spacedrive if
- You want the Spacedrive feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Spacedrive 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…
read the full rclone overview →
About Spacedrive
Spacedrive One file manager for all your devices and clouds. Powered by a Virtual Distributed File System, complete with apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android v2.spacedrive.com • Discord • Getting Started What is Spacedrive? Spacedrive is a cross device data platform. Index files, emails, notes, and external sources. Search everything. Sync via P2P. Keep AI agents safe with built in screening. Content identity — every file gets a BLAKE3 content hash. Same file on two devices produces the same hash. Spacedrive tracks redundancy and deduplication across all your machines. Cross device — see all…
read the full Spacedrive overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or Spacedrive more popular?
rclone has 60,740 GitHub stars and Spacedrive has 39,386. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and Spacedrive free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and Spacedrive under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and Spacedrive?
rclone is written in Go and Spacedrive 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, rclone or Spacedrive?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,740 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Spacedrive if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.