# Amazon S3 vs Tigris

> Amazon S3 has a score of 79.3 (A) against Tigris's 44.6 (E). Both do storage object. The largest gap is reliability, 60 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Amazon S3 has a score of 79.3 (A) against Tigris's 44.6 (E). Both do storage object. The largest gap is reliability, 60 points.

- Amazon S3: grade A, 79.3/100, rank #9 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/amazon-s3.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/amazon-s3.json
- Tigris: grade E, 44.6/100, rank #404 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/tigris.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/tigris.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Amazon S3 for reliability (+60), schema & documentation (+42), agent ergonomics (+30), security & auth (+35), maintenance & community (+6), transparency & trust (+29).

Pick Tigris for payments & pricing (+10).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Amazon S3 | Tigris | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 95 | 35 | Amazon S3 +60 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 92 | 50 | Amazon S3 +42 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 83 | 53 | Amazon S3 +30 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 86 | 51 | Amazon S3 +35 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 20 | 30 | Tigris +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 83 | 77 | Amazon S3 +6 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 80 | 51 | Amazon S3 +29 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -3 | |
| **Total** | | **79.3 · A** | **44.6 · E** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Amazon S3 | Tigris |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Amazon Web Services | Tigris Data |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` | `https://t3.storage.dev` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-30 |
| Popularity | 3.7k stars, 44.8M npm/wk, 578.4M PyPI/wk | 4 stars, 20 npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.4/5 (8) | 3/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Amazon S3.** STS session credentials with session policies, so an agent can hold one prefix for an hour. Egress to the internet is billed per GB after 100 GB a month.

**Tigris.** No egress fees, and one endpoint (t3.storage.dev) with region auto for every location. 16 status incidents between 4 July and 2 October 2026, including outages in US regions on 31 July and 2 August.

## Before you call either

### Amazon S3

1. Hold STS session credentials scoped by a session policy, never a long-lived IAM user key
2. Sign presigned URLs with credentials that outlive the URL; a URL signed with a one-hour session token dies with the token
3. Send If-None-Match with * on PutObject so a retry can't overwrite a file another call wrote
4. Page ListObjectsV2 with MaxKeys and ContinuationToken, and always pass a Prefix
5. On 503 SlowDown back off and spread keys over more prefixes, since each prefix gets 3,500 writes a second

### Tigris

1. Point the AWS SDK at https://t3.storage.dev with region `auto`; the stdio MCP README still shows the older fly.storage.tigris.dev endpoint
2. Ask for an access key with a ReadOnly or ReadWrite role on one bucket rather than an org-wide key
3. Keep presigned URLs short; Tigris accepts up to 90 days
4. Don't call tigris_list_objects on a large bucket; it walks every object with no limit or prefix
5. Use @tigrisdata/iam 2.6.0 or later before writing policies with conditions

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