# Garage S3 object store 83 Hacker News commenters recommended Garage S3 object store and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Simple, free S3-compatible storage that runs on one node or many. Caveat: not fully feature-complete, and critics report data loss after unclean power failures. ## Why people recommend it - Easier to deploy than MinIO (6 comments): "found that Garage is somewhat easier to deploy in comparison to our existing use of MinIO, but is not as performant at high speeds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331682)) "Garage is somewhat easier to deploy in comparison to our existing use of MinIO, but is not as performant at high speeds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330440)) "somewhat easier to deploy in comparison to our existing use of MinIO, but is not as performant at high speeds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333877)) - Simple, lightweight, clean design (4 comments): "It was a lot simpler imo than minio and works great over a handful of servers in different DCs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719456)) "Garage is actually really simple for something that runs on multiple servers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822489)) "it's much simpler - no web ui, no fancy RS coding, no VC-backed AI company" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136462)) - Strong durability and correctness testing (4 comments): "Garage and Ceph (well, radosgw) are the only open source S3-compatible object storage which have undergone serious durability/correctness testing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46328299)) "Building a production-ready S3 replacement requires careful, deliberate and rigorous engineering work (which is what Garage is doing[1])." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153362)) "If you're looking for something that won't eat your data in edge cases, Ceph (and perhaps Garage) are your only options." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46159339)) - Solid replacement for MinIO (3 comments): "From what I have seen in the previous discussions here (since and before Minio debacle) and at work, Garage is a solid replacement." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46328933)) "could swap it out for Garage in a day, caught by a monitoring tool I slopped together" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49328742)) "the smart money and talent have already moved on to systems like Garage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47010640)) ## What people warn about - Weak performance under load (6 comments): "garage was working fine in other scenarios but it really had pathological behavior with the small read/write with torrenting benchmarks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881024)) "found that Garage is somewhat easier to deploy in comparison to our existing use of MinIO, but is not as performant at high speeds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331682)) "single node parallel write performance was pretty unimpressive and started throwing strange errors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46335060)) - Data loss after unclean shutdowns (5 comments): "One site losing power, corrupting the local state, then propagating that corruption to the rest of the cluster would not be fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330772)) "The very first thing Garage did after I installed it on a test three-node cluster is get corrupted and lose files." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712606)) "It's downright stupid if you build a system that loses all existing data when all nodes go down uncleanly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346460)) - Config and CLI friction (3 comments): "I use garage but the main issue i have is the mandatory random keys which means i cannot hardcode them in my compose file." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764103)) "The CLI part was a bit in the way last time, this could have been automated but it wasn't straightforward." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139130)) "the garage.toml configuration file could be a bit more user friendly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762522)) - Missing some S3 features (2 comments): "looks pretty great and I wished I could have used this, but it is not yet feature-complete with S3 protocol" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763427)) "Garage is really good for core S3, the only thing I ran into was it didn't support object tagging." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137108)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [MinIO](https://hackerapproved.com/p/minio.md): 54 recommend - [RustFS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rustfs.md): 48 recommend - [SeaweedFS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/seaweedfs.md): 46 recommend - [VersityGW](https://hackerapproved.com/p/versitygw.md): 16 recommend - [Versity S3 Gateway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/versity-s3-gateway.md): 7 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Garage S3 object store", https://hackerapproved.com/p/garage/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).