head to head · open source
seaweedfs vs ZeroFS
seaweedfs has 35,871 GitHub stars, 3,099 forks, 772 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ZeroFS has 3,164 stars, 128 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. seaweedfs leads on adoption by 1,034% (35,871 vs 3,164 stars). seaweedfs is written in Go under Apache-2.0; ZeroFS is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. seaweedfs has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, ZeroFS 4%. seaweedfs was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (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
| seaweedfs | ZeroFS | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 36K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 128 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick seaweedfs if
- You weight community size — 36K 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 seaweedfs
SeaweedFS SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives: 1. to store billions of files! 2. to serve the files fast! One weed binary serves an S3 object store, a POSIX file system, and a lakehouse with S3 Tables, all over the same data. Each blob is one disk read away, capacity grows by starting another volume server, and cloud storage can be cached or tiered transparently. Both read and write operations have O(1) complexity and can run at the full speed supported by the underlying hardware. Download Binaries for different platforms Wiki Documentation Community…
read the full seaweedfs 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 seaweedfs or ZeroFS more popular?
seaweedfs has 35,871 GitHub stars and ZeroFS has 3,164. seaweedfs has the larger community by that measure.
Are seaweedfs and ZeroFS free?
Both are open source. seaweedfs is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ZeroFS under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between seaweedfs and ZeroFS?
seaweedfs 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, seaweedfs or ZeroFS?
Choose seaweedfs if you want the larger community (35,871 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.