Gluster vs Tahoe-LAFS
Gluster
gluster.orgTahoe-LAFS
tahoe-lafs.orgSide by side
| Figure | Gluster | Tahoe-LAFS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Distributed File System Software | 7.8 (#13) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Installation | The official install page provides source downloads and links to Ubuntu PPAs for Linux packages. | The project documents installation on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD systems. |
| Intended users | The project says Gluster is used in production at organizations in media, healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services. | The project describes a typical deployment where each user runs a gateway on their own machine and connects it to storage servers on other computers. |
| Protocols | The documentation lists NFS and SMB as standard protocols for accessing Gluster. | The documentation describes HTTP(S) and SFTP access through a gateway, and storage-server communication over HTTPS or Foolscap. |
| Purpose | Gluster is a scalable, distributed file system that aggregates disk storage from multiple servers into a single global namespace. | Tahoe-LAFS is a decentralized file storage system that encrypts files, splits them into shares, and distributes those shares across storage servers. |
| Support | The project points users to consultancies for design, performance, and additional support; Red Hat says it does not support community versions. | The installation guide directs users who need help with deployment to the tahoe-dev mailing list or Libera.Chat IRC. |
Plans
In their own words
Gluster
Gluster is free, open-source distributed file-system software for Linux and self-hosted deployments. It combines disk storage from multiple servers into one global namespace, with the project describing scale to several petabytes and thousands of clients. Gluster is POSIX compatible and can use on-disk filesystems supporting extended attributes. Listed capabilities include replication, quotas, geo-replication, snapshots, bitrot detection, and erasure coding. Access options include native GlusterFS, NFS, SMB/CIFS, iSCSI, and a Swift REST API. The project describes workloads such as media streaming, data analysis, and other data- and bandwidth-intensive tasks. Capacity, performance, and availability can scale across on-premise, public-cloud, and hybrid environments, using common off-the-shelf hardware. Installation resources include source downloads and Ubuntu PPAs, while documentation covers AWS deployment, SSL, and access-control lists. The project points users to consultancies for additional support and notes that Red Hat does not support community versions.
Tahoe-LAFS
Tahoe-LAFS is free, open-source software for storing files across multiple servers. Before upload, a client encrypts each file with a unique key. Erasure coding distributes each file as shares, allowing recovery when some storage servers fail; the documented default uses 10 shares across at least 7 servers and can recover from any 3. A gateway checks integrity and ignores corrupted shares. Files can be immutable or mutable, with read-only or read-write access for mutable files and directories. The gateway gives access through HTTP(S) and SFTP, and a REST-style Web API supports programmatic operations. Users can run a gateway or operate a full grid of storage nodes and an introducer. Installation is documented for Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. The software is available under GNU GPL version 2 or later, or the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence version 1.0 or later. It is free at free. The public test grid is for experimentation, not reliable or large-scale storage.