S3 GUI Client & Browser for macOS, Windows and Linux

Pick your platform

The app is one codebase on all three desktops, but the install route and the mount story differ, so there is a page for each of the two that people ask about most:

• Linux: an 88 MB amd64 AppImage or a 9.1 MB .deb for Ubuntu 20.04 and later, and a mount through GNOME Files, Dolphin or davfs2 — see the S3 client for Linux page
• macOS 11 or newer: brew install --cask kilerd/tap/anystorage, or a signed .dmg for Apple silicon or Intel, and a mount in Finder with Cmd+K — see the S3 client for Mac page
• Windows 10 or newer: an x64 NSIS installer of about 6.8 MB or an .msi, from the release page

Release 0.2.25 went out on 23 September 2026 with all of those assets built from the same Tauri v2 source.

A desktop S3 GUI for everyday storage work

Amazon S3 is reliable infrastructure, but daily file work often needs a calmer interface than command-line scripts or a cloud console. AnyStorage gives teams a desktop S3 GUI client for browsing buckets, opening folders, uploading files, downloading objects and moving between storage accounts from one workspace.

The app is useful when you need to inspect files quickly, hand off assets, compare paths or keep multiple buckets open while working across projects. Tabs help preserve context, so a marketing asset bucket, a backup path and a delivery folder can stay ready without repeated navigation.

Built for S3-compatible services too

Modern storage stacks rarely stop at Amazon S3. Many teams use Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO, Wasabi or provider-specific object storage that exposes an S3-compatible API. AnyStorage is designed around that reality: it works as one object storage browser across providers, so backups in B2, public assets in R2 and application files in S3 are three tabs rather than three consoles. R2, B2, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Alibaba Cloud OSS and Tencent Cloud COS have their own connection types; MinIO and Wasabi go through the S3 type with a custom endpoint URL and path-style addressing.

• Connect Amazon S3 and compatible object storage providers.
• Keep credentials on the local machine instead of inside a shared browser session.
• Use the same file workflow across buckets, regions and providers.
• Track uploads and downloads in a unified transfer area.

How to connect to an S3-compatible endpoint

Three fields decide whether a non-AWS provider works on the first try, and getting them wrong produces errors that look like credential problems but are not.

Endpoint URL. AWS is inferred from the region, so you leave it blank. Everything else needs the provider's S3 API host, not its dashboard host. Cloudflare R2 uses https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com. Backblaze B2's S3-compatible endpoint looks like https://s3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com, with the region segment taken from your bucket's details page. A self-hosted MinIO is whatever host and port you run it on, commonly http://192.168.1.10:9000.

Region. For R2, set the region to auto; that is what Cloudflare's S3 API expects, and a copied us-east-1 is a common cause of signature failures. For B2 and Wasabi, the region has to match the one embedded in the endpoint host. For MinIO, us-east-1 is the conventional default unless you configured something else.

Path-style addressing. AWS long ago moved to virtual-hosted-style URLs, where the bucket is a subdomain: https://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/key. Most self-hosted and IP-addressed endpoints cannot do that, because bucket.192.168.1.10 is not a name that resolves. Turning path-style on produces http://192.168.1.10:9000/bucket/key instead. Rule of thumb: enable it for MinIO and for anything reached by IP address or a bare hostname; leave it off for AWS.

You can sanity-check the same three values from a terminal before blaming the app:

aws s3 ls --endpoint-url https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com --region auto
aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket --endpoint-url http://192.168.1.10:9000 --region us-east-1

If the CLI lists your buckets and the app does not, the difference is in one of those three fields. If neither works, the credentials or the bucket policy are the problem.

Two errors point straight back at this section. SignatureDoesNotMatch: The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided usually means the region or the endpoint host does not belong to the keys you pasted, rather than a mistyped secret. And an HTTP 301 carrying The bucket you are attempting to access must be addressed using the specified endpoint means the bucket lives in a different region from the one in the connection dialog. Both are one-field fixes once you know which field.

How it compares with the other S3 clients

Everything below was checked against vendor pages on 23 September 2026. Dates matter in this category: several of these comparisons circulate undated and describe versions that are years old.

Read that table as a set of trade-offs rather than a ranking:

• rclone is the most capable and the least convenient. It reaches roughly 60 backends, and rclone mount gives real drive behaviour at the cost of installing FUSE or WinFsp and choosing a --vfs-cache-mode before many applications will write to the mount.
• Cyberduck is an excellent free browser with a deep provider registry, and it does not mount. If a bucket window is what you needed, stop there.
• S3 Browser is Windows-only, which decides the question for mixed fleets. Transmit, ForkLift and Commander One are macOS-only for the same reason.
• The AWS Console is the right tool for configuring infrastructure and the wrong one for moving files, and it cannot see an R2 or MinIO bucket at all.
• AnyStorage sits between the browser and the mounter: a file workspace first, with an optional mount that uses your operating system's existing WebDAV client instead of a kernel driver.

S3 file manager, bucket GUI, bucket client: which one do you need?

People arrive at this page searching for an S3 file manager, an S3 bucket GUI, an S3 bucket client and an S3 UI client. Those phrases cover two genuinely different products, and choosing badly is why some people end up with a tool they stop opening.

A file manager for S3 is the file-explorer half: a folder tree or two panes, rename, move, delete, drag-and-drop, and a transfer queue you can watch. An S3 GUI client is all of that plus the parts specific to the protocol — endpoint URLs, regions, path-style addressing, presigned links, per-provider connection types. Most tools do both, which is why the words are used interchangeably; the difference only shows at the edges, because a plain file manager cannot help you when a signature fails, and a protocol client with no file workflow cannot help you tidy four hundred objects.

The split that actually decides the tool is where the interface lives.

A browser-based bucket GUI is often enough. If you run MinIO you already have one: the MinIO Console is a graphical interface embedded in the server itself and, in MinIO's words, it "needs no separate installation". It listens on a dynamically assigned port unless you pin one with --console-address or MINIO_CONSOLE_ADDRESS — :9001 is the conventional choice — which is checked September 2026 against MinIO's own documentation. The AWS S3 console is the same shape for Amazon and costs nothing to use. For creating a bucket, editing a policy, uploading a handful of files or answering "did that object land", neither of them needs help.

A desktop client earns its place when one of these is true:

1. More than one provider is involved. A web console only ever sees its own storage, so R2, B2 and an internal MinIO are three logins in three tabs — and the AWS console cannot show you an R2 or MinIO bucket at all.
2. The work is bulk file work: hundreds of renames, a large drag-and-drop, a transfer you want to watch, pause and retry rather than restart.
3. Something outside the browser needs a real path — an editor, a video player, a build script. That is the mount case, and no web console can answer it.
4. Credentials should not live in a shared browser session, because access keys in a console tab are as portable as the tab.

On the desktop the platform decides the rest: the S3 Browser application is a Windows-only product despite the generic-sounding name, Transmit and ForkLift are macOS-only, and the S3 client for Linux and S3 client for Mac pages cover what is left on each.

When AnyStorage fits better than a console

A cloud console is excellent for infrastructure configuration, but it is not always the fastest place to work with files. AnyStorage focuses on the file operations people repeat every day: browse, preview, upload, download, copy links and check transfer state.

That makes it a practical S3 GUI client for developers, operators, agencies and small teams that need a cross-platform desktop storage tool. It keeps the workflow visual without hiding the storage model you already understand.