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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Jist searches JSON 3x faster than jq

Hi HN, jist is a JSON path search tool that feels like accessing a JavaScript object. It’s 3x faster than jq for the same use case, and over 2000x more memory efficient when searching a 3.3GB file for the last element (jist reads data in chunks so has constant space use). It doesn’t implement pattern matching yet. A feature I’m looking to add is generating a full JSON schema using the same streaming approach so stay tuned! Any feedback and feature requests are more than welcome

Jist is a JSON path search tool that queries JSON data using JavaScript object syntax. It processes files in chunks rather than loading them entirely into memory, enabling faster searches with significantly lower… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Jist searches JSON 3x faster than jq launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hi HN! Happy to share that jist can now search JSON 17x faster than jq for a provided input (string or a file). The major change is using the bleeding edge simdjson parser as the preferred way of parsing and querying the input. Since simdjson can only work on files up to 4.2GB, jist falls back to its earlier implementation of scanning through input in chunks of 1MB which means it can still query files of virtually infinite size 3x faster than jq ever could while using ~10MB of memory. The next major feature will be summarizing input JSON into a schema - and it will do this by scanning the…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Interactive JSON filter using jq. Contribute to ynqa/jnv development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    After two years of improvement, I think it's time to share it with you all. Here’s a quick overview: - Common features include validation, formatting, minification, and more. - Visualize JSON in a graph or table view. - Structured comparison with fallback to text comparison. - Navigate though JSON using JSON pointer. - Supports jq. Would love to hear the community's questions, thoughts and comments!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Easy JSON Query Processor with a Lispy syntax in Go - cube2222/jql

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I'm working on a tool that will probably involve querying JSON documents and I'm asking myself how to expose that functionality to my users. I like the power of `jq` and the fact that LLMs are proficient at it, but I find it right out impossible to come up with the right `jq` incantations myself. Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Which tool / language did you end up exposing to your users?

    Oct 2025 · jsonquerylang.org · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey, Hacker News! Today I'm proud to release jless, a command-line JSON viewer. jless provides a JSON viewing experience similar to what you see in a browser's network tab in the developer console, but from the comfort of your terminal, with a whole suite of vim-inspired key bindings to easily manipulate your view of the data and full-text regex search. I'm sure many of you have some piped together some combination of cat, jq and less before; hopefully jless can replace that usage (hence the name). It supports newline delimited JSON too, so it can handle any output from jq. I built jless to…

    2022 · pauljuliusmartinez.github.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    simplest possible native GUI for inspecting JSON objects with jq - fiatjaf/jqview

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8JB
  9. 9JP

    Prettify, inspect and share your JSON data.

    2019 · json.pizza · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Query expressions for semi-structured data. Contribute to cratesland/spath development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Problem JSON/NDJSON is everywhere in data platforms, but compression usually breaks searchability. You either keep queryable raw stores (high I/O/egress) or compress into gz/zstd blobs (cheap to store, painful to probe). The “cloud tax” shows up as wasted reads. What I built (SEE — Semantic Entropy Encoding) A schema-aware, searchable compression codec for JSON that keeps exists/pos lookups fast while still compressing. Internals: structure-aware delta + dictionaries, a PageDir + mini-index to jump to relevant pages, and a tuned Bloom filter that skips ~99% of pages.…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi all, I've made a javascript library to simplify searching/sorting/filtering in arrays of objects. Its inspired by both GraphQL and SQL, but implemented using javascript Proxies. Instead of creating a new language, its all just javascript. I've made it as part of an experimental database, which uses javascript as the query engine. The normal javascript map/reduce/sort functions are quite difficult to master for junior developers. JAQT is easier to explain, and can still be used in combination with any existing array functions. Please let me know what you think of the…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi HN. I've gotten pretty tired of needing to learn a custom programming language for a tool I use once a week or less. So I figured, it might be easier to pick up if `jq` used a programming language I already know. Voila, gq.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    RipDB▲65

    Fast, decentralized key-value Store for web3 builders

    2022 · zdenham.github.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Discover and manipulate any JSON document

    2021 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Tool for lazy developers to convert JSON to C# Objects

    2020 · jsontocsharpconverter.web.app · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Simple visualization tool for your JSON data.

    2022 · jsoncrack.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    2014 · journal.paul.querna.org · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey HN! Jaiqu is an AI agent for creating repeatable JSON transforms using jq query language syntax. Jaiqu translates complex JSON structures into repeatable jq queries. jq is a command line utility built for fast, reliable JSON queries. Jaiqu takes advantage of the LLMs for both constructing jq queries as well as using feedback to fix errors/invalid results if those queries are incorrect. Writing code to parse JSON is super annoying. It usually involves manually reading huge JSON balls, parsing the keys in a language of your choice, and pulling the data manually. Also, you're likely to…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Wrote a thing about what makes Elysia stand out in a performance benchmark game Basically, there's a JIT "compiler" embedded into a framework This approach has been used by ajv and TypeBox before for input validation, making it faster than other competitors Elysia basically does the same, but scales that into a full backend framework This gave Elysia an unfair advantage in the performance game, making Elysia the fastest framework on Bun runtime, but also faster than most on Node, Deno, and Cloudflare Worker as well, when using the same underlying HTTP adapter There is an escape hatch if…

    Feb 2026 · elysiajs.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hello HN! I want to introduce fastgron, my new project. fastgron is a JSON to GRON converter, built to be incredibly fast – it's 40 times faster than Gron. GRON is a tool for making JSON greppable, but it can slow down with larger files. With fastgron, even a 200MB JSON file can be converted in just 1 second. Key features include streaming conversion for memory efficiency and an optimized path reconstruction for faster operations. It leverages C++ and the simdjson and fast_io libraries for speed. I welcome all feedback, suggestions, or questions. Thank you!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22JA

    2015 · hperadin.github.io · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Fast, correct Python JSON library supporting dataclasses, datetimes, and numpy - ijl/orjson

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    :man: a simple, git diffable JSON database on yer filesystem. By the power of NodeJS - DO-SAY-GO/sirdb

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

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