SeaweedFS vs RustFS

Architecture comparison 2 projects Built from source-audited deep dives

SeaweedFS is a Go file store built on Facebook's Haystack idea, with masters, volume servers and a Filer, strong at billions of small files and POSIX mounts. RustFS is a Rust, MinIO-style object store with erasure sets, IAM, KMS and replication. Both are Apache-2.0.

SeaweedFS RustFS

SeaweedFS: Go · Apache-2.0
RustFS: Rust · Apache-2.0
Updated: 2026-09-25

Which one should you pick?

Pick SeaweedFS if…

You store huge numbers of small files and want O(1) disk lookups
You need FUSE mounts or Hadoop-compatible access next to S3
You want to choose the metadata store (RocksDB, PostgreSQL, FoundationDB)

Pick RustFS if…

You want a MinIO-like object store written in Rust
You need object lock, KMS-backed encryption, S3 Select and site replication
You are migrating from MinIO and want tested interoperability

Side by side

Attribute	SeaweedFS	RustFS
Written in	Go Rust	RustShellPython
License	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
Frontend	none	Web console
Backend & APIs	Go Rust	Rust Tokio gRPC S3
Data & persistence	S3 RocksDB	Erasure coding (Reed-Solomon)KMS (Vault / AWS KMS)
Infrastructure & deploy	Docker Kubernetes	Docker Helm Nix OpenTelemetry GitHub Actions
Key decisions	Haystack-inspired architecture: decoupling metadata from chunk storage Pluggable Filer metadata backends (RocksDB, PostgreSQL, FoundationDB) Native S3 and POSIX FUSE filesystem interfaces	Dozens of single-purpose crates behind one rustfs binary Erasure-coded storage with a separate healing and scanner layer Protocols beyond S3 are cargo features
Audited	66f1754 · 2026-09-17	edcc81a · 2026-09-25

How they differ

Two architectures

SeaweedFS separates metadata from data. Masters (coordinated with Raft) assign file ids, volume servers append “needles” into large volume files and keep an in-memory index for single-seek reads, and the Filer maps paths to needles in a pluggable store. RustFS is one binary built from many Rust crates, with crates/ecstore writing objects across erasure sets and crates/heal repairing them.

Interfaces

SeaweedFS exposes S3, FUSE, WebDAV and Hadoop-compatible access from the weed binary. RustFS centres on S3 with a web console, and adds FTPS, WebDAV and GCS by default and Swift and SFTP as opt-in features.

Redundancy

SeaweedFS replicates volumes and can erasure-code cold volumes (8 data + 4 parity shards). RustFS erasure-codes by default and adds bucket and site replication across clusters.

Architecture diagrams

SeaweedFS Open SVG

RustFS Open SVG

Frequently asked questions

Is SeaweedFS or RustFS written in Rust?

RustFS is written in Rust. SeaweedFS is written in Go, with an optional Rust re-implementation of its volume server.

Which one is closer to MinIO?

RustFS. It uses an erasure-coded, MinIO-style design and runs a MinIO interop workflow in CI. SeaweedFS uses a different Haystack-style architecture with masters, volume servers and a Filer.

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