Instead of MinIO: SeaweedFS

Why SeaweedFS is better

• MinIO's community edition stopped shipping binaries in October 2025 and was archived in April 2026. SeaweedFS is actively released with an active maintainer.
• SeaweedFS documents versioning, object lock, lifecycle rules, bucket policies, IAM, presigned URLs and server-side encryption.
• A single weed binary runs the whole stack, and weed server -s3 gives an S3 endpoint on port 8333 with almost no configuration.
• The same SeaweedFS cluster also serves a FUSE filesystem, WebDAV, SFTP and HDFS, and is built for billions of small files.

When to keep MinIO

Stay on MinIO only if you pay for MinIO's commercial AIStor product and its support. An existing community MinIO keeps running, but it receives no security patches, so plan a move.

Switching

Point your S3 clients at the new endpoint with new credentials; most SDKs only need the endpoint URL and path-style addressing. Copy data across with rclone or mc mirror. Credentials are set in a JSON identity file instead of MinIO's two environment variables, which is a one-time job.

Watch out

SeaweedFS has more components (master, volume servers, filer) than MinIO, so a multi-node setup takes more learning. Its storage format is internal, so objects are not plain files on disk. If you only need a throwaway bucket for tests, a smaller tool such as S3Proxy is simpler.

Also worth a look

• Garage A minimal AGPL object store for a few small servers in different places; pick it for simple replicated storage if you do not need versioning or bucket policies.
• RustFS The newest and most MinIO-like replacement, Apache-licensed; promising but young, so test it before trusting it with production data.