#16 in Storage & CDNUpdated 2026-08

Plakar

by Plakar · Open-source, self-hosted backup and restore across your whole estate

41.6 — BenchRank score out of 100

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Overview

Plakar is an open-source backup engine that deduplicates, compresses and encrypts data at source before writing snapshots to storage you control — any S3-compatible backend, local disk or filesystem. One binary covers databases, VMs, Kubernetes, Docker and S3 sources. The self-hosted Control Plane adds estate-wide visibility, with backup policies defined by hand or as code.

Best for: Security and infrastructure teams self-hosting encrypted, deduplicated backups across a mixed estate
Pricing: No prices are shown: the backup engine is described as free and open source, the Control Plane has a free plan, and anything beyond that is behind 'Book a demo'.
Runs on: macOSLinuxSelf-hosted

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

Deduplicates and encrypts before data leaves your system
Snapshots have no chain dependencies; any one can be deleted
Storage-agnostic: any S3-compatible backend, local disk or FS
Policies as code via Kubernetes CRDs, Terraform or Ansible

Trade-offs

Self-hosted only: you run and pay for the infrastructure and storage
Control Plane paid plans are not priced publicly; demo required
Object-lock immutability only on S3-compatible backends
Social proof is forum and X quotes, not named customer references

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

MCP support: 0 out of 100
API quality: 10 out of 100
Documentation: 60 out of 100
Agent friendliness: 98 out of 100
Changelog: 80 out of 100
Marketing site structure: 45 out of 100
Operational trust: 40 out of 100

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

Openness: 85 out of 100
Maintenance: 100 out of 100

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