---
title: MinIO
slug: minio
url: "https://toolweight.com/options/minio"
homepage: "https://min.io/"
categories: s3-compatible-storage
last_verified: 2026-07-23
license: CC-BY-4.0
---

# MinIO

> The self-hosted S3 reference implementation, your hardware, your bandwidth, your SLA.

MinIO is the closest thing to a drop-in S3 replacement you can run yourself: erasure coding, versioning, object lock, lifecycle rules, bucket notifications to a dozen sinks, and a full IAM policy engine with OIDC and LDAP. It is the baseline on this page because it has no price, you are buying servers, disks and transit. Note that the AGPL community build had its browser admin console removed in 2025, pushing administration to the mc CLI or the commercial edition.

## Identity

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| Name | MinIO |
| Company | MinIO |
| One-liner | The self-hosted S3 reference implementation, your hardware, your bandwidth, your SLA. |
| Site | https://min.io/ |
| Docs | https://min.io/docs/minio/linux/index.html |
| Repo | https://github.com/minio/minio |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Open source | Yes |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 |
| Brand | https://toolweight.com/vendors/MinIO |
| Compared in | 1 |

## Where it is compared

### [S3-compatible storage](https://toolweight.com/compare/s3-compatible-storage)
Ranked **#1 of 12** on default weights.
| Field | Value | Confidence | Verified | Source | Note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| True cost /mo (USD) | - | Unknown | - | - | Not applicable, MinIO is software, not a service, so there is no published rate to compute against. For scale: a dedicated server with enough disk for a terabyte of erasure-coded capacity and traffic included lands somewhere around $50-70 a month, plus your time for erasure-coding configuration, upgrades, monitoring and on-call. That is not a like-for-like comparison with a managed provider and we will not present it as one, which also means MinIO is ranked separately from, rather than above, the providers in any preset that turns on cost. |
| True cost /mo (AUD) | - | Unknown | - | - | Null for the same reason. |
| True cost from Sydney (AUD) | - | Unknown | - | - | Null for the same reason. You can certainly run MinIO in Sydney; what it costs there is a hardware and transit question, not a list price. |
| Storage $/TB/mo | - | Unknown | - | - | Your hardware. |
| Egress $/TB | - | Unknown | - | - | Your transit. |
| Egress cap (x stored) | - | Unknown | - | - | Not applicable: whatever your transit contract says. |
| Class A $/M ops | $0 /M ops | Inferred | - | - | Nobody is metering you. |
| Class B $/M ops | $0 /M ops | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Min retention | 0 ms | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Min billed object | 0 B | Inferred | - | - | - |
| S3 API coverage | 98 % | Inferred | - | - | The most faithful reimplementation of the S3 API that exists, and the thing other providers test against. The gaps are AWS-specific services rather than storage semantics. |
| Presigned URLs | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Multipart upload | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Versioning | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Lifecycle rules | ● | Inferred | - | - | Including tiering to a remote S3-compatible target, which is a neat way to run hot-local and cold-cloud. |
| Event notifications | ● | Inferred | - | - | To Kafka, NATS, AMQP, Redis, Postgres, webhooks and more, a wider set of sinks than any managed provider here offers. |
| CDN integration | diy | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Max object size | 5 TB | Inferred | - | - | - |
| IAM granularity | 5 | Inferred | - | - | Full AWS-style policy documents with conditions, plus STS, service accounts, OIDC and LDAP federation. Nothing else here matches it except AWS itself. |
| Sydney region | ● | Inferred | - | - | Any location you can rent a machine in, which for Australia means anywhere with a Sydney or Melbourne facility. |
| TTFB from Sydney | - | Unknown | - | - | Entirely a function of where you put it and how you network it. |
| Durability (nines) | - | Unknown | - | - | Depends on your erasure set size, drive count and failure-domain layout. MinIO gives you the tools; the number is yours to earn. |
| Uptime SLA | - | Unknown | - | - | You are the SLA. |
| Object lock / WORM | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Replication model | erasure-coded | Inferred | - | - | Reed-Solomon erasure coding across drives and nodes, plus optional active-active site replication. |
| Official MCP server | ● | Inferred | - | - | MinIO ships an MCP server for bucket and object administration. |
| GA year | 2,015 | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Positioning | The self-hosted S3 baseline, full API fidelity in exchange for operating it. | Inferred | - | - | - |

**Verdict.** The reference point rather than a competitor: it shows you what full S3 fidelity looks like and therefore what you are giving up when you buy cheap. Worth running only if you already operate storage hardware, and note the community build lost its admin console in 2025, which changed a lot of people's assumptions about what 'free and complete' meant.

## Alternatives

- [AWS S3](https://toolweight.com/options/aws-s3), The API everything else copies, and by far the most expensive egress in this roster.
- [Backblaze B2](https://toolweight.com/options/backblaze-b2), Cheap US and EU object storage with free egress up to three times stored volume.
- [Bunny Storage](https://toolweight.com/options/bunny-storage), Edge storage built as a CDN origin, with its own API rather than a faithful S3 one.
- [Cloudflare R2](https://toolweight.com/options/cloudflare-r2), S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees, on Cloudflare's network.
- [DigitalOcean Spaces](https://toolweight.com/options/digitalocean-spaces), Bundled object storage plus free CDN, priced as a flat base fee with overages.
- [Hetzner Object Storage](https://toolweight.com/options/hetzner-object-storage), The cheapest credible S3 endpoint in Europe, with a deliberately thin feature set.
- [iDrive e2](https://toolweight.com/options/idrive-e2), USD 4/TB S3-compatible storage with zero-egress marketing and a fair-use cap.
- [Scaleway Object Storage](https://toolweight.com/options/scaleway-object-storage), European-sovereign S3 storage with multi-AZ classes and a real IAM system.
- [Storj](https://toolweight.com/options/storj), Decentralised erasure-coded storage: USD 4/TB stored, USD 7/TB egress, no regions.
- [Tigris](https://toolweight.com/options/tigris), Globally distributed S3-compatible storage that caches objects near readers.
- [Wasabi](https://toolweight.com/options/wasabi), Flat-rate hot storage with no egress or API fees, bounded by a fair-use cap.

## Licence and attribution

Data from toolweight (https://toolweight.com), licensed CC-BY-4.0.

- Licence: [CC-BY-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
- Canonical HTML: https://toolweight.com/options/minio
- Machine-readable: https://toolweight.com/options/minio.md · https://toolweight.com/api/v1 · https://toolweight.com/mcp
- toolweight takes no affiliate revenue and sells no placements. Corrections: https://toolweight.com/suggest