Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Lightweight Task queue on Erlang/OTP, SQLite-backed, no overengineering

Setting up Kafka or such enterprise oriented software with their clusters or dedicated servers is heavy and bothering enough that most small teams or indie hackers skip it entirely and making compromise to use in-memory queues. I wanted something in between: a persistent queue that is simple to run (one binary, which makes one sqlite db), gets real fault isolation and crash recovery due to Elixir, easy to inspect (open ezra.db in any SQLite browser and see every task), and requires no new client library - it speaks the Redis Streams wire protocol, so any Redis client in any language just…

Ezra is a lightweight task queue built on Erlang/OTP and backed by SQLite, designed as a middle ground between simple in-memory queues and heavy enterprise solutions like Kafka. It runs as a single binary that creates… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
Upstash▲233
Serverless data platform for Redis and Kafka
2022 · upstash.com · its alternatives →
2
PgQueuer – Transform PostgreSQL into a Job Queue▲376
PgQueuer is a Python job queue that uses PostgreSQL for everything — queue storage, locking, notifications. No Redis, no RabbitMQ, no separate broker to operate. If your app already has Postgres, you already have the broker. After ~2 years and 26 minor releases, 1.0 ships today as the first stable release. Strict semver from here on. Thanks to everyone who contributed and left feedback!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Drop-in SQS replacement based on SQLite▲656
Hi! I wanted to share an open source API-compatible replacement for SQS. It's written in Go, distributes as a single binary, and uses SQLite for underlying storage. I wrote this because I wanted a queue with all the bells and whistles - searching, scheduling into the future, observability, and rate limiting - all the things that many modern task queue systems have. But I didn't want to rewrite my app, which was already using SQS. And I was frustrated that many of the best solutions out there (BullMQ, Oban, Sidekiq) were language-specific. So I made an SQS-compatible replacement. All you have…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
Hatchet – Open-source distributed task queue▲578
Hello HN, we're Gabe and Alexander from Hatchet (https://hatchet.run), we're working on an open-source, distributed task queue. It's an alternative to tools like Celery for Python and BullMQ for Node.js, primarily focused on reliability and observability. It uses Postgres for the underlying queue. Why build another managed queue? We wanted to build something with the benefits of full transactional enqueueing - particularly for dependent, DAG-style execution - and felt strongly that Postgres solves for 99.9% of queueing use-cases better than most alternatives (Celery uses Redis or…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
KQ – Simple Job Queue for Python Using Kafka▲116
Kafka-based Job Queue for Python. Contribute to joowani/kq development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
Speeding up PostgreSQL through vectorized execution▲332
Vectorized executor to speed up PostgreSQL. Contribute to citusdata/postgres_vectorization_test development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
7ES
EloqKV – Scalable distributed ACID key-value database with Redis API▲44
We're thrilled to unveil EloqKV, a lightning-fast distributed key-value store with a Redis-compatible API. Built on a new database architecture called the Data Substrate, EloqKV brings significant innovations to database design. Here’s the unique features that makes it stand out: - Flexible Deployment: Run it as a single-node in-memory KV cache, a larger-than-memory database or scale to a highly available, distributed transactional database with ease. - High Performance: Achieves performance levels comparable to top in-memory databases like Redis and DragonflyDB, while significantly…
2024 · eloqdata.com · its alternatives →
8
A threaded, TCP, key value store in Haskell▲63
A multi-threaded, TCP, key-value store inspired by Redis implemented in Haskell. - honza/redish
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Bunqueue – Job queue for Bun using SQLite instead of Redis▲39
⚡ High-performance job queue for Bun. SQLite by default, PostgreSQL multi-broker when you scale. DLQ, cron, SQLite S3 backups, and native MCP. No Redis. - egeominotti/bunqueue
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
10
Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres▲240
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 →
11
My Go SQLite driver did poorly on a benchmark, so I fixed it▲234
https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3 was doing poorly on this benchmark that was posted yesterday to HackerNews [1]. With the help of some pprof, I was able to trace it to a serious performance regression introduced two weeks ago, and come up with the fix (happy to field questions, if you're interested in the nitty gritty). It's not the fastest driver around, but it's no longer the slowest: comfortably middle of the pack. It's based on a WASM build of SQLite, and thanks to https://wazero.io doesn't need CGO. [1]:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
WakaQ - a Python distributed task queue▲147
Open source IDE plugins for programmers.
2022 · wakatime.com · its alternatives →
13
Distributed SQLite on FoundationDB▲150
Hello HN! I'm building mvsqlite, a distributed variant of SQLite with MVCC transactions, that runs on FoundationDB. It is a drop-in replacement that just needs an `LD_PRELOAD` for existing applications using SQLite. I made this because Blueboat (https://github.com/losfair/blueboat) needs a native SQL interface to persistent data. Apparently, just providing a transactional key-value store isn’t enough - it is more easy and efficient to build complex business logic on an SQL database, and it seems necessary to bring a self-hostable distributed SQL DB onto the platform.…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3▲185
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 →
15GA
Goqite, a persistent message queue Go library built on SQLite▲99
I wanted to build a persistent message queue based on SQLite, because that's what I'm using for my main state anyway. This gives me ACID across state and messaging, which is nice! I've been inspired by the terminology of AWS SQS for this, but it's obviously much simpler. Maybe you can use it too. :)
2024 · goqite.com · its alternatives →
16
Lux – Drop-in Redis replacement in Rust. 5.6x faster, ~1MB Docker image▲59
A Redis-compatable key-value store. Up to 10x faster. Native vector support. - lux-db/lux
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
17AB
A bi-directional, persisted KV store that is faster than Redis▲79
we've been working on a KV store for the past year or so which is 2-6x faster than Redis (benchmark link below) yet disk persisted! so you get the speed of in-memory KV stores but with disk persistence. To achieve this we've created our custom filesystem that is optimized for our special usecase and we're doing smart batching for writes and predictive fetching for reads. In addition to basic operations, it also provides atomic inc/dec, atomic json patch, range scans and a unique key monitoring mechanism (pub-sub) over WebSockets which essentially allows you to receive notification on…
2025 · hpkv.io · its alternatives →
18
DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows▲114
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 →
19
I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker▲84
I've been running long duration coding agents with Claude Code for about 6 months now. Steve Yegge released Beads back in October and I found that giving Claude tools for proper task tracking was a massive unlock. But Beads grew massively in a short time and every release made it slower and more frustrating to use. I started battling it several times a week as its background daemon took to syncing the wrong things at the wrong times. Over the holidays I finally ripped it out and wrote ticket as a replacement. It keeps the core concept I actually cared about (graph-based task dependencies)…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
DBOS transact – Ultra-lightweight durable execution in Python▲89
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 →
21
Rlite – A serverless Redis-compatible database▲27
self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional redis-compatible database engine. rlite is to Redis what SQLite is to SQL. - seppo0010/rlite
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
Your Own Task Queue for Python▲75
yotaq - Your Own Task Queue for Python. Contribute to JoseTomasTocino/yotaq development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
Redis Java 8 Client and Command Executor▲33
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
24PA
Phoenix – an ultra-fast SQL layer on top of Hbase▲32
Query HBase with standard SQL and JDBC. Low latency OLTP and operational analytics for Hadoop.
2014 · phoenix.incubator.apache.org · 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 →