# MinIO 54 Hacker News commenters recommended MinIO and 149 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (3 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended as simple, S3-compatible object storage on your own servers, robust to drive failure. Most common caveat: the free community edition has been cut back in favor of paid licensing. ## Why people recommend it - Simple to set up and run (5 comments): "it was very simple to setup, and even if you just leased a bunch of servers off say OVH, far FAR cheaper to run your own" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137753)) "It's very robust in the face of drive & server failure, is simple to manage on bare hardware with ansible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001715)) "it was super easy setup that would take far more of both hardware and work to replicate to ceph" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022646)) - Cheaper than S3 or Ceph (5 comments): "it was very simple to setup, and even if you just leased a bunch of servers off say OVH, far FAR cheaper to run your own" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137753)) "it was a lot more cost effective and performant to create a minio cluster for that data than to use S3." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140730)) "it was super easy setup that would take far more of both hardware and work to replicate to ceph" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022646)) - Drop-in S3-compatible API (4 comments): "I still find it useful as a local blob storage and no big code changes to cut over to s3 since it's the same APIs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156521)) "if all you need is basic object storage that works with existing S3 clients, then MinIO is enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201420)) "You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085906)) - Good performance, low RAM use (4 comments): "something blocked it from reaching the 20-25 gigabits (on a 25g NIC) that MinIO could reach" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331237)) "MinIO was the only option with sufficient performance for this particular situation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652007)) "Minio is literally "point it at storage(s), done". And at far smaller RAM usage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140274)) ## What people warn about - Maintenance mode and sunset risk (7 comments): "very few things which are good and free today will stay that way tomorrow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000842)) "When a company surfs on the open source wave to get contributions, grow penetration, then smoothly slows maintenance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013717)) "Start open source to use free advertising and community programmer, and then dumps it all for commercial licensing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136687)) - Free tier cut, paid tier pricey (5 comments): "it was the last update before they neutered the community version" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137217)) "their paid version which is way too expensive for most use cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138032)) "You should probably reconsider going with it in 2026 unless you're fine with their new (non -opensource) offering." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086326)) - AGPL license limits commercial adoption (4 comments): "AGPL is a plague. So many possible partners or future stewards won't touch anything minIO with a ten foot pole" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201438)) "Licenses like the AGPLv3 (which min.io used here) can be problematic on that front" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001228)) "Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143858)) - Corruption, CVE and XML bugs (3 comments): "It is bad that the control plane responses can be malformed XML" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137633)) "MinIO objects would randomly become corrupted, which MinIO would present as "you're making too many requests, please slow down"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646462)) "there is an CVE in that version that allows any account level to increase their own permissions to admin level" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137287)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Garage S3 object store](https://hackerapproved.com/p/garage.md): 83 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, "MinIO", https://hackerapproved.com/p/minio/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).