Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to BoxLite – the all-terrain micro-VM
Hi HN. I'm Dorian, founder of Polygala. We are building a micro-VM runtime for all kinds of use case including embedded like SQLite, local deployment like MySQL and cloud deployment like AWS Aurora
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - ottomatica/slim
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
I built a SQLite VFS in Rust that serves cold queries directly from S3 with sub-second performance, and often much faster. It’s called turbolite. It is experimental, buggy, and may corrupt data. I would not trust it with anything important yet. I wanted to explore whether object storage has gotten fast enough to support embedded databases over cloud storage. Filesystems reward tiny random reads and in-place mutation. S3 rewards fewer requests, bigger transfers, immutable objects, and aggressively parallel operations where bandwidth is often the real constraint. This was explicitly inspired…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Hi HN! We’re Yann, Edouard, and Bastien from Koyeb (https://www.koyeb.com/). We’re building a platform to let you deploy full-stack apps on high-performance hardware around the world, with zero configuration. We provide a “global serverless feeling”, without the hassle of re-writing all your apps or managing k8s complexity [1]. We built Scaleway, a cloud service provider where we designed ARM servers and provided them as cloud servers. During our time there, we saw customers struggle with the same issues while trying to deploy full-stack applications and APIs resiliently. As…
2023 · koyeb.com · its alternatives →
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EtherLite▲77Blockchain platform for building decentralized applications
2021 · etherlite.org · its alternatives →
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2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Boxes.devfree tier, from $19/mo▲112Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…
Jun 2026 · boxes.dev · its alternatives →
- 8
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
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Contribute to libriscv/drogon-sandbox development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A lite demo server, inspired by Vite. Contribute to Jinjiang/vlite development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - GitHub - ottomatica/slim at 2.x
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Monoliths and microservices
2016 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - ottomatica/slim
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Virtink is a Kubernetes add-on for running Cloud Hypervisor virtual machines. By using Cloud Hypervisor as the underlying hypervisor, Virtink enables a lightweight and secure way to run fully virtualized workloads in a canonical Kubernetes cluster.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18MI
2015 · app.force12.io · its alternatives →
- 19LV
Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…
2021 · its alternatives →
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postgres + sqlite = pglite. Contribute to viggy28/pglite development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
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 →
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Streamlit is a Python web app framework for the fast development of data apps. This project is to make it run completely on web browsers with power of Pyodide/Wasm.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23BS
Today we are thrilled to announce the release of a public Kalavai pool dedicated to host Petals workers. This is part of our wider effort to offer easy access to compute to AI developers. Do you find this useful? What other tooling would you like to see running on crowdsourced hardware?
2024 · kalavai-net.github.io · its alternatives →
- 24
Also compare
- Slim – Build and run tiny VMs from Dockerfiles alternatives
- Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3 alternatives
- Run globally distributed full-stack apps on high-performance MicroVMs alternatives
- Hoplite alternatives
- EtherLite alternatives
- microvm – a minimalist machine type for QEMU inspired by Firecracker alternatives
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 →