Restic vs Rustic
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?
Compare Restic with
choose an app… Syncthing LocalSend MinIO Rclone copyparty Puter croc Spacedrive Nextcloud File Browser SeaweedFS Cloudreve Magic Wormhole Duplicati Kopia BorgBackup Velero bup Backrest Duplicacy CKAN pgBackRest bitmagnet Timeshift WAL-G Docker Volume Backup Sanoid rsnapshot Backup wrapper nono Backup-rsync-time-backup Barman mydumper Back In Time pgBackWeb SnapRAID Vorta Open Archiver Wayback btrbk mail-archiver Backup tool nono Plakar borgmatic Autorestic BackupPC MySQL backup XtraBackup Restic REST Server Gickup Stash by AppsCode Restic alt MiniBackup Restic Browser rdiff-backup Bareos ElkarBackup alt Snapper zrepl K8up Ganymede Bupstash UrBackup Kanister linux-timemachine ZFS Autobackup MySQL Backup Container Restic Cron ZnapZend Restic Mailer BorgWarehouse Deja Dup Burp Backblaze alt Kopia-UI Standalone Knoxite ArchivesSpace ElkarBackup Collective Access - Providence Duplicacy alt MailpileBackup nono pgmoneta Duplicity Conserve Backup Backblaze alt nono Nxs-backup Amanda Tarsnap GUI Minarca Backup DAR Obnam2 Rdiffweb Restic Exporter Kup Minarca BackupNinja Time Machine Eonvelope Yuno Archive Custom Backup Sosse HashBackup
Compare Rustic with
choose an app… Rclone Duplicati Kopia BorgBackup Velero bup Backrest Duplicacy CKAN pgBackRest bitmagnet Timeshift WAL-G Docker Volume Backup Sanoid rsnapshot Backup wrapper nono Backup-rsync-time-backup Barman mydumper Back In Time pgBackWeb SnapRAID Vorta Open Archiver Backup tool nono Plakar borgmatic Autorestic BackupPC Restic alt MiniBackup Bupstash Restic Cron Restic Mailer Deja Dup Burp Backblaze alt Kopia-UI Standalone Knoxite Duplicity Conserve Backup Tarsnap GUI Minarca Backup Obnam2 Rdiffweb Minarca BackupNinja HashBackup
Feature Restic Rustic Category Backup & Recovery Backup & Recovery License BSD-2-Clause Apache-2.0 Language Go Rust Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 256 MB 128 MB Deployment binary, docker binary GitHub stars ★ 35,412 ★ 3,170 First released 2015 2022 Replaces Backblaze, Carbonite Backblaze, CrashPlan
Why pick each one
Choose Restic if… Strong encryption Efficient deduplication Wide backend support Restic details Choose Rustic if… Released under the Apache-2.0 license Active community (3.2k GitHub stars) Written in Rust Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM Rustic details
Frequently asked questions Is Restic or Rustic better? Neither is universally better. Restic has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Restic and Rustic free and open-source? Yes. Restic is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and Rustic under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Restic and Rustic with Docker? Restic: yes. Rustic: check the project docs for container support.