Ente

What is Ente?

Ente is an open source, end-to-end encrypted cloud platform that stores your photos and two-factor authentication codes without the provider ever being able to read them. Everything is encrypted on your device before upload, so Ente — or anyone who breaches it — sees only ciphertext. It ships as two main apps: Ente Photos and Ente Auth.

What is Ente best for?

Ente is best for people who want the convenience of cloud photo backup or a synced 2FA authenticator but refuse to hand their library to an ad-funded provider. It suits privacy-conscious individuals and families migrating off Google Photos, iCloud Photos, or Authy, and anyone who’d rather run the whole stack on their own hardware.

What can Ente do?

• Ente Photos — automatic phone and desktop backup, albums, favorites, archive, hidden photos, trash, memories, and widgets across all platforms.
• On-device AI — face recognition and natural-language semantic search that run locally, so your photos are never sent to a server for processing.
• Ente Auth — a free, end-to-end encrypted 2FA authenticator that syncs your codes across devices, with import from Authy and Google Authenticator.
• Ente Locker — encrypted storage for documents and credentials with emergency-access support.
• Sharing — encrypted public links, collaborative albums, comments, and a family plan that shares your storage with up to 5 members at no extra cost.
• Cross-platform apps — native clients for iOS, Android (Play Store and F-Droid), web, macOS, Linux, and Windows, plus a CLI.
• Migration and export — import tools from Google, Apple, and Amazon Photos, and export tools so your data is never locked in.
• Verifiable privacy — fully open source under AGPL-3.0 and independently audited by Cure53, Symbolic Software, and Fallible.

Where does Ente fall short?

Storage costs more per gigabyte than mainstream clouds because Ente stores three encrypted replicas across separate locations rather than a single copy — you pay for redundancy and privacy, not the cheapest bytes. End-to-end encryption also means there is no server-side password recovery: lose your master password and recovery key and your data is unrecoverable by design. And while self-hosting the Go “museum” server is straightforward, you still depend on Ente’s own object-storage buckets or your own S3-compatible storage, which you must provision and back up yourself.

Is Ente free?

Partly. Ente Photos gives you 10GB free forever, with paid plans at $2.49/mo (50GB), $4.99/mo (200GB), $9.99/mo (1TB), and $19.99/mo (2TB). Ente Auth is completely free. If you self-host, the entire stack — the same server code used in production — is free under AGPL-3.0, and you pay only for your own storage.

What does Ente replace?

Ente Photos is a private, encrypted alternative to Google Photos and iCloud Photos, and Ente Auth is a drop-in replacement for Authy, which shut down its desktop app. Unlike those services, Ente encrypts your data on-device so the provider can never read it. If you want photo backup without encryption, self-hosted options like Immich and PhotoPrism are the closest open source comparisons; for 2FA alone, 2FAuth is another self-hosted route.

FAQ

Is Ente open source? Yes. The full source — clients and the server — is on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license and has been externally audited by Cure53, Symbolic Software, and Fallible.

Can I self-host Ente for free? Yes. The Go server (museum) runs via Docker Compose and needs only about 1GB of RAM and 1 CPU core to start. You supply your own object storage, and both the web and mobile apps can point at your self-hosted server.

Is Ente a good Google Photos alternative? For privacy, yes — it encrypts every photo on your device before upload, unlike Google Photos, while still offering face recognition, search, albums, and family sharing. The tradeoff is higher storage pricing and no server-side account recovery.

Is Ente Auth free? Yes, Ente Auth is free forever. It’s an end-to-end encrypted 2FA authenticator that syncs across iOS, Android, desktop, and web, and imports codes from Authy and Google Authenticator.