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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to All I wanted was to grok some real-time data

Hi HN, We are launching Denormalized (www.denormalized.io), a serverless real-time data platform built on Kafka and Pinot. We felt a bit burnt out by the sheer developer toil we faced when building application around the real-time data stack and set out to create a platform to allow small teams to be very productive with realtime data without having to glue together an elaborate system to serve real-time as well as time series queries. Here is our motivating post. Would appreciate any and all feedback.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. All I wanted was to grok some real-time data launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    tl;dr we built an embeddable stream processing engine in Rust using apache DataFusion, check us out at https://github.com/probably-nothing-labs/denormalized Hey HN, We’d like to showcase a very early version of our embeddable stream processing engine called Denormalized. The rise of DuckDB has abundantly made it clear that even for many workloads of Terabyte scale, a single node system outshines the distributed query engines of previous generation such as Spark, Snowflake etc in terms of both performance and cost. Now a lot of workloads DuckDB is used for were normally…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Upstash▲233

    Serverless data platform for Redis and Kafka

    2022 · upstash.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3AL

    www.github.com/nubskr/walrus

    Nov 2025 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Slava Akhmechet schools us on RethinkDB and the realtime web

    2015 · changelog.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Diskless Kafka® on S3. 10x Cost-Effective. No Cross-AZ Traffic Cost. Autoscale in seconds. Single-digit ms latency. Multi-AZ Availability. - AutoMQ/automq

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    tl;dr we’re releasing python bindings for writing stream processing jobs using the Denormalized Rust library. Hey HN, A few months ago we released Denormalized, our embeddable stream processing engine written in rust [0]. Today we’re excited to showcase python bindings for the library. Python is still very much the language of data and we wanted to make it easy for more engineers to write fast streaming jobs without having to learn Rust. Currently, you can use the library to write streaming aggregations, stream joins, and user defined aggregate functions (thought the API for this is quite…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    The data community's workbench

    2018 · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Realpub▲10

    Not Infrastructure. The realtime data delivery platform.

    2017 · its alternatives →

  9. 9RT

    We are working on a product which makes stream processing easy for data analysts and data scientists. It’s a higher level alternative to Flink, Kafka Streams and Spark Streams. As well as making stream processing simpler, we also felt that lots of people were building these AWS stream processing platforms based on Kafka and something like Flink so wanted to offer this as a service. We would welcome any input on the space or approach: Home page: http://Timeflow.systems Demo: https://youtu.be/fGfgBaHXOkE

    2020 · its alternatives →

  10. 10EY

    Hey HN, We're thrilled to introduce you to Edginary, our new groundbreaking startup set to change how developers access and scale their data globally. We've all felt the pain points of dealing with centralized data sources: performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and the dreaded revenue loss due to downtime. Edginary is here to tackle these issues head-on. Edginary is a serverless platform that moves your data close to your users in real-time so they can access it in ultra low-latency. By reducing the load on your servers and databases, we aim to not only improve performance and…

    2024 · edginary.io · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Real-time analytics: FastAPI, Kafka, TimescaleDB

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Ultra simple time series data storage

    2018 · pushdata.io · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14HD

    Hi HN, My background is on datascience and I thought during the last few weeks on how to turn the data into commodity problem: Getting any meaningful out of data can be erroneous, time-consuming and includes repeatable processing work (and it is done over and over again). Im trying to mitigate this by harmonizing data, so it is ready for being consumed via an API or Spreadsheet. After a few iterations I ended up with this prototype that I wanted to share with you. Please notice, that this is an early prototype and not a finalized product yet. Im also delighted to know your opinions or…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  15. 15SD
  16. 16PF

    Hi there Hacker News, I've started a side project http://datasourcehub.com which aims to be a platform for data scientists. The project is still in the idea phase so the UI/UX and functionality are all subject to change. Feel free to play around, below is a guest login, and make sure files are content type of 'text/csv'. All data is subject to deletion, it's just a sandbox right now! By reaching out to the Hacker News community I hope to reach expert data scientists and get their feedback. Below are some questions I'd like to answer and some proposed directions that this…

    2013 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Real-time Time-series and High-Performance Arrow Cache

    2025 · crates.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18DN

    Hi everyone, Anuj here, Dataherald CEO. There are a bunch of EXTERNAL data sources in the world that people use a lot -- think census data, Bureau of Labor Statistics (unemployment, inflation), but even proprietary data sources. I was tired of getting these into useable data pipelines every time I need need to use them. Dataherald simply creates data pipelines to hundreds of data sources and then lets you create auto-updating data viz -- all in under 60 seconds. The goal is to enable non-tech users to more easily use data, which has been a huge problem for me throughout my career. We…

    2022 · medium.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Real-time data visualisation made easy

    2025 · chirpier.co · its alternatives →

  20. 20PD
  21. 21OB

    Hi HN, The two of us are working on our real time analytics service Worldlogger for two-an-a-half months now. Today we rolled out a new version. It still has some bugs here and there, but it works :) Worldlogger kind of does what Chartbeat and Getclicky are doing, but we try to mix the best from both worlds ;) Curious what you think about it! http://worldlogger.com/ Cheers E

    2010 · worldlogger.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi everyone, it’s Alex, Simon, Felipe and the team from Unikraft.io We have built kraft.cloud, a millisecond cloud platform, where apps and services cold start, scale to zero and autoscale in milliseconds, ensuring you never pay for idle, can efficiently cope with traffic peaks, and don’t have to deal with complex cold start issues. As of today we are now in open early access! The platform (and we) come from research in the area of lightweight virtualization — trying to ask the question of how efficient cloud platforms could (or should) be while still retaining strong, hardware-level…

    2024 · kraft.cloud · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi, over the past few months I've been working on this project: Numax is a small Rust runtime that does three things: it runs WebAssembly modules in a sandbox, has a built-in local key-value store, and syncs everything across nodes with CRDTs and gossip. Basically, you write a wasm module, run it on two machines, and they converge (I hope !). It's a decentralized system... I hope someone finds it interesting! There's a whitepaper I've put a lot into, and I think the code isn't bad either! I believe there's still room in this world for software that's fun and well made, and while building…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24RT

    We have been involved in a number of real time streaming projects using tools such as Flink, Spark Streams and Kafka Streams backed by "real time" databases such as Druid. We always found these projects quite complex to develop and run, with stream processing in particular being a bit of a dark art. A stream to stream join in Flink can get quite mind bending for instance. In 2020 we had the idea of building a low code SaaS product for real time streaming analytics. The first attempt failed due to being a little over-engineered and with too many changes of direction, but over the last few…

    2021 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →