Knoxite vs Rustic
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted backup & recovery options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Knoxite | Rustic |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Read-the-docs project | Read-the-docs project |
| Health score | 13 · At risk | 88 · Excellent |
| Category | Backup & Recovery | Backup & Recovery |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 128 MB | 128 MB |
| Deployment | binary, bare-metal | binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 493 | ★ 3,273 |
| First released | 2016 | 2022 |
| Replaces | Backblaze | Backblaze, CrashPlan |
What are Knoxite and Rustic?
Knoxite
Knoxite is a flexible data storage and backup tool that supports deduplication, encryption, and many storage backends. It can back up to local disk, SFTP, and S3-compatible targets.
- Deduplicated backups
- Encryption
- Multiple storage backends
- Cross-platform
Rustic
Rustic is a backup tool written in Rust that creates fast, encrypted, and deduplicated backups. It is fully compatible with Restic repositories while offering lower memory usage.
- Restic-compatible repositories
- Low memory footprint
- Cold storage support
Knoxite vs Rustic: key differences
Knoxite is written in Go, while Rustic is built with Rust. Licensing differs — GPL-3.0 for Knoxite versus Apache-2.0 for Rustic. Knoxite is the more established project (first released 2016), while Rustic arrived in 2022. Rustic has the considerably larger community, at 3,273 GitHub stars versus 493.
Why pick each one
Choose Knoxite if…
- Released under the GPL-3.0 license
- Written in Go
- Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
Choose Rustic if…
- Released under the Apache-2.0 license
- Active community (3.3k GitHub stars)
- Written in Rust
- Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
Frequently asked questions
Is Knoxite or Rustic better?
Neither is universally better. Rustic has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Knoxite and Rustic free and open-source?
Yes. Knoxite is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Rustic under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Knoxite and Rustic with Docker?
Knoxite: check the project docs for container support. Rustic: check the project docs for container support.