OpenEBS

Open source container-attached storage for Kubernetes

As of 1 September 2026, OpenEBS is free to use. A CNCF project providing persistent volumes for Kubernetes with no licence fee and no vendor to invoice. Softwr lists it under Cloud. OpenEBS is made by OpenEBS, a CNCF project, available on Linux.

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Overview

What OpenEBS does

OpenEBS provides persistent storage for Kubernetes by running storage itself as containers, so volumes are managed by Kubernetes rather than by an external array. Its Replicated storage engine, built on the Mayastor NVMe data plane, gives synchronously replicated volumes across nodes; the Local engines provide simpler node-local volumes over LVM, ZFS or hostpath for workloads that handle their own replication. It is a CNCF project and the code is Apache licensed. The distinguishing point is architectural honesty about what you need. Many teams running Cassandra, Kafka or a distributed database on Kubernetes already have application-level replication and do not need the storage layer to replicate again; OpenEBS Local engines give them fast node-local volumes without paying twice for durability. Teams running PostgreSQL, which does not replicate at the volume level, use the Replicated engine instead. Choosing the wrong engine is the most common cause of disappointing results. OpenEBS is free. Commercial support exists through DataCore, which acquired the original sponsor MayaData in 2021, and that relationship is what a production buyer should investigate before adopting it. Without a support contract you own every failure mode of a distributed storage system, and the trade-off against a priced product such as Portworx is precisely the cost of that ownership versus the cost of the licence.

What people use it for

Running Cassandra or Kafka on Kubernetes where the application already replicates and node-local volumes are sufficient
A platform team that needs persistent volumes on bare metal Kubernetes without a per node subscription
An edge or lab deployment where a commercial storage licence cannot be justified
Replacing hostpath volumes with something that has snapshots and a Container Storage Interface driver

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about OpenEBS.

There is no vendor on the other end of an incident unless you separately contract DataCore, so an outage at three in the morning is resolved by your own team and a public Slack channel.
The project has several storage engines with different maturity and different operational characteristics, and choosing the wrong one for your workload produces poor results that look like a product failure.
Documentation and upgrade guidance assume real Kubernetes storage knowledge, so teams without that expertise underestimate the operational load they are taking on.
Project governance shifted after DataCore acquired MayaData in 2021, which means the direction of a supposedly neutral project is influenced by one commercial sponsor.
Disaster recovery, cross-cluster replication and policy-driven data services are thinner than in the commercial alternatives, so organisations with those requirements end up building them or buying a product anyway.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of OpenEBS

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

OpenEBSvs
Portworx
Portworx: Portworx if you want a supported commercial product with disaster recovery and are willing to pay per node hour
OpenEBSvs
Ceph
Ceph: Ceph with Rook for a more established open source distributed storage system
OpenEBSvs
Rancher
Rancher: Rancher where you want a managed Kubernetes platform with Longhorn as the bundled storage option

Pricing

What OpenEBS costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

OpenEBS

Free

Apache 2.0 licensed
All storage engines included
No node or capacity limits
Community support via Kubernetes Slack
Commercial support available separately from DataCore

Capabilities

Features

Replicated engine
Synchronously replicated NVMe volumes across cluster nodes
Local PV engines
Node-local volumes over LVM, ZFS or hostpath with low overhead
Kubernetes-native management
Volumes defined and operated through Kubernetes custom resources
Snapshots and clones
Point-in-time volume copies through the Container Storage Interface
No licence fee
Apache licensed CNCF project with no per node charge
Hardware independence
Runs on any Kubernetes cluster and any underlying disks

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Who supports it in production?

The project is community supported. Commercial support is available from DataCore, which acquired the original sponsor MayaData in 2021. Establish that relationship before production, not during an incident.

Which engine should we use?

If your application replicates its own data, use a Local engine and avoid replicating twice. If it does not, such as with PostgreSQL, use the Replicated engine.

Does it cost anything?

No licence fee. The cost is operational, and a support contract if you want someone accountable.

Keep looking

Where to go from OpenEBS

Best Cloud software for

Compare OpenEBS with

Other Cloud software

Portworx
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From $0.33/node hour11 researched notes
Rancher
Kubernetes management platform for multiple clusters
Open source9 researched notes
Longhorn
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Open source11 researched notes
DigitalOcean
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Podman
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Qovery
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Go
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Proxmox VE
Open-source hypervisor combining KVM and LXC virtualisation
From €120/yr12 researched notes
K3s
Lightweight certified Kubernetes distribution in a single binary
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Rook
Kubernetes operator that deploys and manages Ceph storage clusters
Open source11 researched notes
containerd
Industry-standard container runtime, and the engine inside Docker
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minikube
Run a single-node Kubernetes cluster locally for development
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Cilium
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Flux
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Linkerd
Lightweight service mesh for Kubernetes
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for OpenEBS, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.