Amazon S3 vs MinIO
No clear leader: MinIO (62.5) and Amazon S3 (59.5) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for file storage. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is a distributed cloud storage platform that allows organizations to store, retrieve, and manage any volume of data. It offers multiple storage classes optimized for different access patterns and use cases, along with built-in analytics, compliance controls, and security features.
MinIO
A commercially licensed object storage system designed to unify data for analytics, AI applications, and intelligent agents across multiple deployment environments. AIStor scales from single-node development to unlimited enterprise deployments with built-in replication, encryption, lifecycle management, and support for Apache Iceberg data lakes.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Amazon S3
Usage-based pricing with metered storage (per GB), request charges (per 1,000 operations), and data transfer costs. Free tier includes $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for 6 months.
- S3 Standard-
- Full availability and durability guarantees
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering-
- Automatic tiering between access tiers
- No retrieval charges
- Up to 80% cost reduction
- S3 Tables$0.03 per gb
- Native Apache Iceberg support
- Automatic table compaction
- Higher transaction throughput
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval-
- Cost-effective archival storage
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive-
- Deep archival for compliance and long-term retention
- S3 Express One Zone-
- Fastest cloud object storage
- Single availability zone
MinIO
Free tier (single-node, ≤400 TiB). Enterprise Lite and Enterprise subscriptions priced on usable capacity with volume discounts.
- FreeFree
- Full AIStor feature set
- Community Slack support
- Documentation support
- Enterprise LiteContact sales
- Multi-node horizontally scalable
- Lite SUBNET subscription
- Health diagnostics and security reporting
- Optional add-on: direct-to-engineer support with <5 day SLA
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Unlimited scale
- Enterprise SUBNET subscription
- Health diagnostics, security reporting, team governance
- Proactive 24/7/365 direct-to-engineer support
- <4 hour SLA and Panic Button
- +1 more
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
- Apache Iceberg
Amazon S3
- Dremio
- DuckDB
- HighByte Intelligence Hub
- Ryft
- AWS CloudFront
- AWS Lambda
- AWS API Gateway
- AWS Analytics Services
- AWS Bedrock
- Asana
- Brave Search API
- Pokee AI
- Tailscale
- TrendAI Vision One
- Orca Security
- Cast AI
- LucidLink
- Vanta
MinIO
- S3
- S3 Express
- SFTP
- Delta Lake
- Databricks OpenSharing
- Delta Sharing
- Unity Catalog
- Kubernetes
- Spark
- NVIDIA STX
- Ray
- Databricks
- Apache Hudi
Amazon S3 or MinIO: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.