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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to DBOS Python 1.0 – Lightweight Durable Workflows Built on Postgres

Hi HN – this is Peter from DBOS here with Qian (qianli_cs) and Jeremy (jedberg). We’re building an open-source, lightweight durable workflows library on top of Postgres. Ever since we first launched on HN last year, we’ve been blown away by the support, feedback, and response we’ve received from the community. We've realized durable workflows are critical for everything from business processes to AI automation to data pipelines, but most existing durable orchestration tools are either too heavy or too complicated for most applications. Instead, we're building something lightweight, simple,…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN! This is Qian here with Peter (KraftyOne) and Jeremy (jedberg). We’re building DBOS, an open-source, lightweight durable workflows library that you can add to Python apps in just a few lines of code. It’s comparable to popular open-source workflow and queue libraries like Airflow and Celery, but more lightweight with a greater focus on reliability and automatically recovering from failures. Our goal in building DBOS is to make workflows lightweight and flexible so you can add them to your existing apps with minimal work. Everything you need to run durable workflows and queues is…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN - DBOS CEO here with the co-founders of DBOS, Peter (KraftyOne) and Qian (qianli_cs). The company started as a research project of Stanford and MIT, and Peter and Qian were advised by Mike Stonebreaker, the creator of Postgres, and Matei Zaharia, the creator of Spark. They believe so strongly in reliable, serverless compute that they started a company (with Mike) to bring it to the world! Today we want to share our brand new Python library providing ultra-lightweight durable execution. https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py Durable execution means your program…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN - I’m Peter, here with Harry (devhawk), and we’re building DBOS Java, an open-source Java library for durable workflows, backed by Postgres. https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-java Essentially, DBOS helps you write long-lived, reliable code that can survive failures, restarts, and crashes without losing state or duplicating work. As your workflows run, it checkpoints each step they take in a Postgres database. When a process stops (fails, restarts, or crashes), your program can recover from those checkpoints to restore its exact state and continue from where…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN - I’m Peter, here with Max (hmaxdml), and we’re building DBOS Go, an open-source Go library for durable workflows, backed by Postgres. https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-golang DBOS workflows make your programs durable by automatically checkpointing their state to Postgres. If your program crashes or fails, all workflows seamlessly resume from their last completed step when your program restarts. This durability makes workflows useful for solving many different problems, including: - Operating an AI agent, or anything that connects to an unreliable or…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN - Peter from DBOS here with my co-founder Qian (qianl_cs) Today we want to share our TypeScript library for lightweight durable execution. We’ve been working on it since last year and recently released v2.0 with a ton of new features and major API overhaul. https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-ts Durable execution means persisting the execution state of your program while it runs, so if it is ever interrupted or crashes, it automatically resumes from where it left off. Durable execution is useful for a lot of things: - Orchestrating long-running or…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6PN

    We've been hard at work for a few weeks and thought it's time for another update. In case you missed our first post, PostgresML is an end-to-end machine learning solution, running alongside your favorite database. This time we have more of a suite offering: project management, visibility into the datasets and the deployment pipeline decision making. Let us know what you think! Demo link is on the page, and also here: https://demo.postgresml.org

    2022 · postgresml.org · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    We'd love to share our work with you: Restate, a system for workflows-as-code (durable execution). With SDKs in JS/Java/Kotlin and a lightweight runtime built in Rust/Tokio. https://github.com/restatedev/ https://restate.dev/ It is free and open, SDKs are MIT-licensed, runtime permissive BSL (basically just the minimal Amazon defense). We worked on that for a bit over a year. A few points I think are worth mentioning: - Restate's runtime is a single binary, self-contained, no dependencies aside from a durable disk. It contains basically a…

    2024 · restate.dev · its alternatives →

  8. 8PW

    Hey HN, I'm a big fan of the Postgres ecosystem and the reliability it brings to the TS stack. More often than not, the answer to "should I add another piece of infrastructure?" is "Postgres can already do that." I’ve been a long-time user of https://timgit.github.io/pg-boss, but I wanted to take the developer experience (DX) a step further for multi-step processes, especially for AI workflows. I built pg-workflows to provide a fluent API for defining durable background logic. Instead of manually stitching together disparate jobs, you can define your business logic as a clean,…

    Feb 2026 · sokratisvidros.github.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Every data pipeline job I had to tackle required quite a few components to set up: - One tool to ingest data - Another one to transform it - If you wanted to run Python, set up an orchestrator - If you need to check the data, a data quality tool Let alone this being hard to set up and taking time, it is also pretty high-maintenance. I had to do a lot of infra work, and while this being billable hours for me I didn’t enjoy the work at all. For some parts of it, there were nice solutions like dbt, but in the end for an end-to-end workflow, it didn’t work. That’s why I decided to build an…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN! We're Evgeny and Arjun, and we’re building a better way to do analytics with Postgres. We love Postgres for its simplicity, power, and rich ecosystem. But engineers have to still get bogged down with heavyweight and expensive OLAP systems when connecting an analytics data stack. Postgres is amazing at OLTP queries, but not for OLAP queries (large data scans and aggregations). Even in this case, we’ve still heard from countless scaling startups that they still try to use only a read replica to run analytics workloads since they don’t want to deal with the data engineering complexity of…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Durable workflow automation in just a few lines of code - autokitteh/autokitteh

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Data notebook built for speed, visibility, and collaboration

    2023 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Postgres-Backed Drop-in Temporal Replacement. Contribute to dbos-inc/dbosify-py development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN! I’m Tony, one of the co-founders of Inngest (https://inngest.com/) Inngest is an open-source durable workflow platform that works on any cloud. Durable workflows are stateful, long running step functions written in code, which automatically retry on failure. It abstracts everything about queues, event streams and state for you, letting you focus on code. Some examples of uses: managing stateful AI chained step functions; managing search/rag indexes and data pipelines; integrations and webhooks; billing and payment flows. Technical details: unlike other solutions,…

    2024 · inngest.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN - this is Alexander from Hatchet. We’re building an open-source platform for managing background tasks, using Postgres as the underlying database. Just over a year ago, we launched Hatchet as a distributed task queue built on top of Postgres with a 100% MIT license (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643136). The feedback and response we got from the HN community was overwhelming. In the first month after launching, we processed about 20k tasks on the platform — today, we’re processing over 20k tasks per minute (>1 billion per month). Scaling up this quickly was…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    DBngin▲133

    Free all-in-one database version management tool 🛠️

    2018 · dbngin.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    This is a MVP for Serverless Postgres. 1/ It uses Fly.io[0], which can automatically pause your database after all connections are released (and start it again when new connections join). 2/ It uses Oriole[1], a Postgres extension with experimental support for S3 / Decoupled Storage[2]. 3/ It uses Tigris[3], Globally Distributed S3-Compatible Object Storage. Oriole will automatically backup the data to Tigris using background workers. I wouldn't recommend using this in production, but I think it's in a good spot to provoke some discussion and ideas. You can get it running…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    bit.io▲130

    All your data in one place

    2021 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hello fellow hackers! I'm excited to share the launch of WhoDB by Clidey. We are hoping to redefine the user experience with database management. Going away from the LLMs hype, we really just want to make developers' lives better! WhoDB is written in Golang, is lightweight, and supports a variety of database backends (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite3, MongoDB, & Redis). WhoDB offers: * Better UX: Intuitive and easy-to-use interface. * Faster Performance: Built with GoLang for exceptional speed and table virtualization in the Frontend. * Schema Visualization: Interactive graphs to visualize your…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20OA

    A lightweight engine for durable execution / deterministic workflows I built with Rust, wasmtime and the WASM Component Model. Its main use is running reliable, long-running workflows that can automatically resume after failures. Looking for feedback on the approach and potential use cases!

    2025 · obeli.sk · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN. As a backend developer using PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails for more than 10 years, around 3 years ago, I caught a spark to learn as much as I could about how to operate high performance, scalable, and reliable PostgreSQL databases. As I reflected on my own career path, I realized there are other developers that may want to learn more about this. I saw an opportunity to help show backend developers how they could put advanced, powerful, PostgreSQL features to use, to help build and scale their Rails apps. I've been fortunate to give presentations in both the PostgreSQL and Rails…

    2023 · pragprog.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22BA
  23. 23

    Hey! I'm Andrei. I got frustrated by how people tend to build overcomplicated backend systems, being "motivated" by big tech case studies and popular books. So, I started exploring lean architecture, and building my digital garden of ideas, approaches and data that align with this direction. Here I want to present one of the tools – Sizing tool for PostgreSQL. I've benchmarked PostgreSQL on different EC2 instances and disks, with different initial data sets to see performance that these instances can give you. And I've built a tool to visualize this data, which I welcome you to explore. So,…

    Jul 2026 · postgres.saneengineer.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A look at modern database approaches and how Citus scales PG

    2016 · softwareengineeringdaily.com · its alternatives →

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