head to head · open source
Apache Pinot vs ZeroFS
Apache Pinot has 6,171 GitHub stars, 1,529 forks, 1,403 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ZeroFS has 3,164 stars, 128 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Apache Pinot leads on adoption by 95% (6,171 vs 3,164 stars). Apache Pinot is written in Java under Apache-2.0; ZeroFS is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. Apache Pinot has attracted 25% as many forks as stars, ZeroFS 4%. Apache Pinot 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
| Apache Pinot | ZeroFS | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 6.2K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Java | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 128 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Apache Pinot if
- You weight community size — 6.2K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- 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 Apache Pinot
What is Apache Pinot? Features When should I use Pinot? Contributing to Pinot Apache Pinot YouTube Channel Building Pinot Deploying Pinot to Kubernetes Join the Community Documentation License What is Apache Pinot? Apache Pinot is a real time distributed OLAP datastore, built to deliver scalable real time analytics with low latency. It can ingest from batch data sources (such as Hadoop HDFS, Amazon S3, Azure ADLS, Google Cloud Storage) as well as stream data sources (such as Apache Kafka). Pinot was built by engineers at LinkedIn and Uber and is designed to scale up and out with no upper bound. Performance…
read the full Apache Pinot 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 Apache Pinot or ZeroFS more popular?
Apache Pinot has 6,171 GitHub stars and ZeroFS has 3,164. Apache Pinot has the larger community by that measure.
Are Apache Pinot and ZeroFS free?
Both are open source. Apache Pinot is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ZeroFS under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Apache Pinot and ZeroFS?
Apache Pinot is written in Java 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, Apache Pinot or ZeroFS?
Choose Apache Pinot if you want the larger community (6,171 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ZeroFS if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.