MinIO
MinIO is the self-hosted S3 reference implementation — your hardware, your bandwidth, your SLA. We compare it in S3-compatible storage. It is 2nd of 12 on S3 API coverage (98 %). The trade-off is being 10th of 12 on CDN integration (diy).
What is MinIO?
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. Founded 2014. Open source under AGPL-3.0. We carry it as the do-it-yourself baseline, not as a vendor.
We track it in 1 comparison — S3-compatible storage — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 11 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.
Where it wins.
- S3 API coverage — 98 %, 2nd of 12.
- IAM granularity — 5, tied for best across 2 of 12 tools.
- Official MCP server — Yes, which only 3 of 12 tools here manage.
- Replication model — erasure-coded, 3rd of 12.
Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.
Where it gives ground.
- CDN integration — diy, 10th of 12. Cloudflare R2 records free-bundled.
None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.
Provenance. 19 of 28 tracked fields carry a value for MinIO, and 0 of those cite a document you can open. Nothing here carries a verification date yet, which is itself a reason to check before committing. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.
Its nearest neighbour in our data is AWS S3. MinIO is ahead on Class A $/M ops ($0 /M ops against $5 /M ops) and Class B $/M ops ($0 /M ops against $0.4 /M ops). AWS S3 takes CDN integration (first-party-paid against diy). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see MinIO alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2014
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0 (open source)
- Fields we track
- 19 of 28
MinIO in S3-compatible storage
Ranked against 12 tools across 28 sourced fields. Open the full S3-compatible storage table.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.
Where it lands in this roster
- S3 API coverage
- 98 %2nd of 12 Inferred
- IAM granularity
- 51st of 12 Inferred
- Official MCP server
- Yes1st of 12 Inferred
- CDN integration
- diy10th of 12 Inferred
- Replication model
- erasure-coded3rd of 12 Inferred
- Sydney region
- Yes1st of 11 Inferred
- Min retention
- 0 ms1st of 12 Inferred
- Versioning
- Yes1st of 11 Inferred
When to use MinIO
MinIO is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:
- On-premises or air-gapped deployments where data cannot leave your control.
- Teams that need AWS-grade IAM semantics without AWS.
- A local development target that behaves like production S3.
- S3 API coverage is your binding constraint. MinIO records 98 %, 2nd of 12 in the S3-compatible storage roster.
- IAM granularity is your binding constraint. MinIO records 5, the best figure in the S3-compatible storage roster. We define that field as 1–5 on how finely you can scope credentials.
- Official MCP server is your binding constraint. MinIO records Yes, which only 3 of the 12 tools in the S3-compatible storage roster do.
- Replication model is your binding constraint. MinIO records erasure-coded, 3rd of 12 in the S3-compatible storage roster.
When not to use MinIO
Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:
- CDN integration. MinIO records diy, 10th of 12 in the S3-compatible storage roster. Cloudflare R2 records free-bundled on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.
Tools compared alongside MinIO
Everything below shares at least one comparison category with MinIO, ordered by how much overlap there is. For the reasoning on each — which fields it wins, which it loses — see MinIO alternatives.Recent MinIO changes
- 2025-06-03 · deprecationMinIO strips the admin console from the community buildMinIO removed the browser-based management UI from the AGPL community edition, leaving the mc CLI for administration and reserving the console for the commercial AIStor product. Entirely within the licence, badly received, and it pushed a number of self-hosters back toward managed providers.
Sources and gaps
What we don't know. 9 of the 28 fields we track for MinIO are still blank: True cost /mo (USD), True cost /mo (AUD), True cost from Sydney (AUD), Storage $/TB/mo, Egress $/TB, Egress cap (x stored), TTFB from Sydney and Durability (nines), and 1 more. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.