Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Lightweight Durable Workflows Built on Postgres
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
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,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 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
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
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 →
- 5
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 →
- 6
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 →
- 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
Zapier for Developers — Link Airtable, Stripe, Slack + more
2019 · its alternatives →
- 9
Durable workflow automation in just a few lines of code - autokitteh/autokitteh
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
- 11PW
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 →
- 12OA
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 →
- 13
Hey HN, I’m Jimmy, co-founder of Dropbase (https://www.dropbase.io). We are an internal tools builder for Python developers. All you have to do is import any Python scripts/libraries, declare UI components, and layer app permissions so you can share them with others. We’re a middle ground between Airplane and Retool—simpler UI creation than Airplane, more code-centered than Retool. UI building is declarative and you can bind Python scripts/functions to UI components. You can write Python scripts/functions using our App Studio with support from a Python Language…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 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
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 →
- 16
- 17
Hello Everyone! We built SQLFlow as a lightweight stream processing engine. We leverage DuckDB as the stream processing engine, which gives SQLFlow the ability to process 10's of thousands of messages a second using ~250MiB of memory! DuckDB also supports a rich ecosystem of sinks and connectors! https://sql-flow.com/docs/category/tutorials/ https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow We were tired of running JVM's for simple stream processing, and also of bespoke one off stream processors I would love your feedback, criticisms and/or…
Dec 2025 · sql-flow.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Workflow orchestrator written in rust. Contribute to RainingComputers/Flowmium development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN folks, I'm a co-creator of the Dapr CNCF project and co-founder of Diagrid. Today we announced a free-to-use web app that takes any form of workflow diagram (UML, BPMN, scribble in your favorite drawing tool or even on paper) and generates code that runs in any IDE and that can be deployed to Kubernetes and other container based systems, based on Dapr's durable execution workflow engine. This essentially allows you to run durable workflows in minutes and leaves out the guesswork for how to structure, code and optimize a code-first workflow app. I'm happy for you to give this a try and…
2025 · workflows.diagrid.io · its alternatives →
- 20AT
A bunch of developers and myself have created RepliByte - an open-source tool to seed a development database from a production database. Features: - Support data backup and restore for PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB - Replace sensitive data with fake data - Works on large database (> 10GB) (read Design) - Database Subsetting: Scale down a production database to a more reasonable size - Start a local database with the prod data in a single command - On-the-fly data (de)compression (Zlib) - On-the-fly data de/encryption (AES-256) - Fully stateless (no server, no daemon) and lightweight…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 21
Prefect is a workflow orchestration framework for building resilient data pipelines in Python. - PrefectHQ/prefect
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Contribute to orch8-io/engine development by creating an account on GitHub.
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
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 →
- 24
Hello HN! We’re excited to show you DBOS, a transactional serverless SDK and platform that makes it easy to write fault-tolerant, observable, and scalable TypeScript applications. We’re a startup commercializing research we did at Stanford and MIT. (https://dbos-project.github.io/). The main idea behind DBOS is to store EVERYTHING about your application in the database. This gives you some unique features: * Reliable execution – Your program’s execution state is stored in the database, so if it’s ever interrupted, it automatically resumes from where it left off without…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- DBOS Python 1.0 – Lightweight Durable Workflows Built on Postgres alternatives
- DBOS transact – Ultra-lightweight durable execution in Python alternatives
- DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows alternatives
- DBOS TypeScript – Lightweight Durable Execution Built on Postgres alternatives
- Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows in Go alternatives
- I built an open-source data pipeline tool in Go 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 →