BeeGFS vs OpenAFS
BeeGFS
beegfs.ioOpenAFS
openafs.orgSide by side
| Figure | BeeGFS | OpenAFS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Distributed File System Software | 8.2 (#7) | 7.7 (#15) |
| Founded | 2014 | 2000 |
| Intended users | ThinkParQ describes its target environments as HPC, AI and deep learning, life sciences, and oil and gas. | The documentation describes AFS cells as suitable for organizations such as companies, university departments, or other defined groups of users. |
| Security | BeeGFS repositories and packages are digitally signed, and its documentation describes TLS encryption for some network communication by default. | AFS clients and servers mutually authenticate, and server processes encrypt particularly sensitive information sent to clients. |
| Support | Hive Enterprise includes professional support, and BeeOND Enterprise lists 5×9 Next Business Day support with 24x7x4 available upon request. | The project wiki points users to mailing lists, an IRC channel, and a page listing individuals and companies offering support or consulting. |
Plans
In their own words
BeeGFS
BeeGFS is a parallel file system for high-performance computing, AI, and other data-intensive workloads. Its user-space services run over filesystems such as ext4, XFS, and ZFS, with metadata spread across multiple servers. It is designed to scale performance and capacity from small clusters to enterprise systems with thousands of nodes. Native client and server components are available for Linux across x86_64, AMD, ARM, OpenPower, and other CPU architectures. BeeGFS 8 Remote Storage Targets synchronize with S3 object storage, while BeeGFS Copy supports parallel copying among BeeGFS and other locally mounted file systems. System-wide monitoring and Grafana dashboards provide views of performance and system health. Hive Enterprise adds high availability, metadata and file-content mirroring, quota enforcement, and tiered storage pools. The Community Edition is free up to 1 PB of total storage and is for self-supported end users; its BeeOND use is limited to five compute nodes contributing storage. Capacity beyond 1 PB requires a subscription license. BeeGFS is available for Linux, API, and self-hosted deployment.
OpenAFS
OpenAFS is a free, open-source implementation of the AFS distributed filesystem for accessing network files as though they were local. Location transparency lets users keep the same pathname when administrators move files between machines. AFS supports federated sharing and read-only replication across file servers, while the client Cache Manager keeps files in disk or memory cache to reduce repeated network requests. Kerberos authentication uses tokens for authenticated status, and directory access control lists define user and group permissions. Clients and servers mutually authenticate, with server processes encrypting particularly sensitive information sent to clients. However, commands in the fs, pts, and vos suites do not encrypt data before transmission. OpenAFS supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted deployment, with AFS access plus NFS and SMB/CIFS options listed. The project lists version 1.8.16.1 as a June 2026 UNIX/Linux maintenance release and distributes it under the IBM Public License. Administrators assign each AFS volume a size limit or quota.