JuiceFS
Ranked 2 of 4 distributed storage systems by recommenders
People value JuiceFS for scale and durable S3-backed storage, but critics cite poor performance with many small files.
People value JuiceFS for scale and durable S3-backed storage, but critics cite poor performance with many small files.
28 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 13
- approval share
- 54%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Scales to very large volumes
“JuiceFS can be scaled to hundreds of PB by design, also is verified by thousands of users in production”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” “It supports very large volume, more than 100PiB and 10B files in a single volume.”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” Durable S3-backed storage for sandboxes
“the key trick is storage: JuiceFS (Redis metadata + S3 data + cache) makes sessions truly persistent”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Building a self-hosted cloud coding agent” “We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system.”
Comment from 27 Aug 2026 on Hacker News Easy to set up and manage
“JuiceFS can be setup very easily to not have a single point of failure”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” “Just much easier to manage.”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Poor performance with many small files
“it is fiddly especially for workloads with many small files”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” “showed very bad performance (i.e. total collapse within a few hours) when running lots of small operations (torrents).”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” “performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” - Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3”
Metadata loss or crash inconsistency
“If the machine is killed at any time between those two steps, the metadata points at a chunk that doesn't exist.”
Comment from 22 Oct 2026 in “SBD: We Have a Filesystem at Home” “losing the metadata is like throwing away the key to an encrypted drive”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” Architecture criticized as odd or fragile
“My criticism is of the basic architecture, not usability or fitness for a particular purpose.”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” “I feel like it's sort of pointless to pair Redis with S3 like this”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” “This is like building an operating system on top of a browser.”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3” - Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3”
Other distributed storage systems people recommend
The three most recommended other distributed storage systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ceph | 49 | 23 | 68% | 11 | — | Approved |
| JuiceFSThis page | 15 | 13 | 54% | 7 | — | — |
| Longhorn | 8 | 13 | 38% | 7 | — | — |
| Andrew File System (AFS) | 5 | 2 | 71% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
31 of the 35 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“If the machine is killed at any time between those two steps, the metadata points at a chunk that doesn't exist.”
“We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system.”
“very bad (short) experiment with JuiceFS”
“we use juicefs which separates the actual data and metadata”
“JuiceFS for posix but lack of versioning”
“the key trick is storage: JuiceFS (Redis metadata + S3 data + cache) makes sessions truly persistent”
“The JuiceFS + copy-on-write snapshot approach is clever”
“Sounds ideal for your kind of situation where a filesystem is being abused as a database”
“block-level filesystems do not adapt at all well to being implemented across a network”
“Just much easier to manage.”
“Works well, for high performance it has limited use cases where privacy concerns matter.”
“It supports very large volume, more than 100PiB and 10B files in a single volume.”
“My criticism is of the basic architecture, not usability or fitness for a particular purpose.”
“This is a lot more than other "POSIX compatible" overlays claim”
“I thought this was a wildly insane thing to do.”
“losing the metadata is like throwing away the key to an encrypted drive”
“This is like building an operating system on top of a browser.”
“JuiceFS can be scaled to hundreds of PB by design, also is verified by thousands of users in production”
“I feel like it's sort of pointless to pair Redis with S3 like this”
“performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations”
“showed very bad performance (i.e. total collapse within a few hours) when running lots of small operations (torrents).”
“It is not clear that pjdfstest establishes full POSIX semantic compliance.”
“So odd to design this kind of software and lose this property.”
“I wouldn't replace NFS with JuiceFS for arbitrary workloads.”
“Juice is very neat and doesn't need us to hype it”
“we couldn't get sufficient performance to train on”
“JuiceFS can be setup very easily to not have a single point of failure”
“I don't see the actual JuiceFS setup anywhere in the ZeroFS repository”
“Commercial license for non-OSS projects.”
“it is fiddly especially for workloads with many small files”
“outperforms JuiceFS on common small file workloads”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.