BorgBackup vs pgBackWeb

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted backup & recovery options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
FeatureBorgBackuppgBackWeb
CategoryBackup & RecoveryBackup & Recovery
LicenseBSD-3-ClauseMIT
LanguagePythonGo
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM256 MB256 MB
Deploymentbinary, bare-metaldocker
GitHub stars★ 13,588★ 2,615
First released20152024
ReplacesCarbonite, BackblazeAWS RDS Backups

Why pick each one

Choose BorgBackup if…

  • Excellent space efficiency
  • Strong security
  • Battle-tested
BorgBackup details

Choose pgBackWeb if…

  • Released under the MIT license
  • Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (2.6k GitHub stars)
pgBackWeb details

Frequently asked questions

Is BorgBackup or pgBackWeb better?

Neither is universally better. BorgBackup has the larger community, while pgBackWeb is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are BorgBackup and pgBackWeb free and open-source?

Yes. BorgBackup is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and pgBackWeb under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run BorgBackup and pgBackWeb with Docker?

BorgBackup: check the project docs for container support. pgBackWeb: yes.

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