head to head · open source
ZeroFS vs aistore
ZeroFS has 3,164 GitHub stars, 128 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. aistore has 1,952 stars, 293 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ZeroFS leads on adoption by 62% (3,164 vs 1,952 stars). ZeroFS is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; aistore is written in Go under MIT. ZeroFS has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, aistore 15%. aistore was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (kubernetes), 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
| ZeroFS | aistore | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 3.2K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 128 | ⑂ 293 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ZeroFS if
- You weight community size — 3.2K 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 aistore if
- You want the aistore feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and aistore fits your workflow better
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 →
About aistore
AIStore: High Performance, Scalable Storage for AI Workloads AIStore (AIS) is a lightweight distributed storage stack tailored for AI applications. It's an elastic cluster that can grow and shrink at runtime and can be ad hoc deployed, with or without Kubernetes, anywhere from a single Linux machine to a bare metal cluster of any size. Built from scratch, AIS provides linear scale out, consistent performance, and a flexible deployment model. AIS is a reliable storage cluster that can natively operate on both in cluster and remote data, without treating either as a cache. AIS consistently shows balanced I/O…
read the full aistore overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ZeroFS or aistore more popular?
ZeroFS has 3,164 GitHub stars and aistore has 1,952. ZeroFS has the larger community by that measure.
Are ZeroFS and aistore free?
Both are open source. ZeroFS is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and aistore under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ZeroFS and aistore?
ZeroFS is written in Rust and aistore in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, ZeroFS or aistore?
Choose ZeroFS if you want the larger community (3,164 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose aistore if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.