head to head · open source
cubefs vs ZeroFS
cubefs has 5,684 GitHub stars, 715 forks, 265 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. ZeroFS has 3,164 stars, 128 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. cubefs leads on adoption by 80% (5,684 vs 3,164 stars). cubefs is written in Go under Apache-2.0; ZeroFS is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. cubefs has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, ZeroFS 4%. ZeroFS was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (cloud-storage, distributed-file-system, fuse, 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
| cubefs | ZeroFS | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.7K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-22 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 715 | ⑂ 128 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cubefs if
- You weight community size — 5.7K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 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 cubefs
CubeFS Overview CubeFS ("储宝" in Chinese) is an open source cloud native distributed file & object storage system, hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a graduated project. What can you build with CubeFS As an open source distributed storage, CubeFS can serve as your datacenter filesystem, data lake storage infra, and private or hybrid cloud storage. Moreover, it can be run in public cloud services, providing cache acceleration and file system semantics on top of public cloud storage such as S3. In particular, CubeFS enables the separation of storage/compute architecture for databases, search…
read the full cubefs 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 cubefs or ZeroFS more popular?
cubefs has 5,684 GitHub stars and ZeroFS has 3,164. cubefs has the larger community by that measure.
Are cubefs and ZeroFS free?
Both are open source. cubefs is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ZeroFS under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cubefs and ZeroFS?
cubefs 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, cubefs or ZeroFS?
Choose cubefs if you want the larger community (5,684 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.