Carbonite vs Garage

Compare Carbonite and Garage on pricing, features, platforms, and ratings — both Cloud Storage tools, Subscription vs Open Source pricing to decide which fits…

At a Glance

 CarboniteGarage
Primary categoryCloud StorageCloud Storage
RatingNot documentedNot documented
Pricing modelSubscriptionOpen Source
Starting price$4.91/month (billed annually)Free
Free planNot documentedNot documented
Free trialYesNot documented
PlatformsWeb, iOS, Android, Mac, WindowsNot documented
Team collaborationNot documentedNot documented
AI featuresNot documentedNot documented
Public APINot documentedYes

Pricing Compared

Starting price reflects the lowest paid tier, not the full cost for every team size or usage level.

Carbonite

Safe Basic — $4.91/month billed annually
Safe Plus — $6.99/month billed annually
Safe Prime — $8.74/month billed annually
Safe Pro Core — ~$24/month billed annually
Safe Pro Power — ~$50/month billed annually
Safe Pro Ultimate — ~$83.33/month billed annually

Garage

Self-Hosted (Open Source) — Free N/A

Pros & Cons

Carbonite

Pros

  • Unlimited storage on personal plans regardless of data volume
  • Long operating history and enterprise backing from OpenText
  • Physical courier recovery option for restoring large data sets without a slow download
  • 256-bit encryption and two-factor authentication for account security

Cons

  • Personal plans cover only a single computer by default
  • English-only language support
  • File version history is capped at the 12 most recent versions rather than unlimited
  • Business/server plans are priced and licensed separately, which can add up at scale

Garage

Pros

  • Free and open source under AGPLv3 with no vendor lock-in
  • Genuinely lightweight; runs on secondhand or low-power hardware
  • Purpose-built for geo-distributed, non-datacenter deployments
  • Avoids consensus bottlenecks through a CRDT-based design
  • Backed by public research funding rather than venture capital, aligning incentives with users

Cons

  • Not a fully managed service; requires self-hosting and cluster administration
  • Smaller ecosystem and less commercial support than AWS S3, MinIO or Backblaze B2
  • Best suited to small-to-medium scale rather than hyperscale storage needs
  • AGPLv3 licensing can be a blocker for some commercial redistribution use cases

Use Cases

Carbonite

  • Personal computer backup — Unlimited, automatic backup of a single home computer with optional external drive coverage.
  • Small business workstation and server backup — Backup coverage for a defined number of business computers and servers, with expandable storage.
  • Large-scale data recovery — Physical courier recovery service for restoring large volumes of backed-up data without a slow download.

Garage

  • Self-hosted backup target — Provides an S3-compatible destination for backup tools like restic and rclone across low-cost servers.
  • Storage backend for federated apps — Serves as the object storage layer for federated services such as Mastodon, Matrix and PeerTube.
  • Geo-redundant community storage — Lets non-profits and collectives replicate data across volunteer or donated hardware in different locations.

Read the full Carbonite review · Read the full Garage review