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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to PgCat, Postgres pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover

PostgreSQL pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover support. - postgresml/pgcat

PgCat is a Postgres connection pooler that manages database connections while adding sharding, load balancing, and failover capabilities. It is designed for developers and database administrators who need to scale… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. PgCat, Postgres pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hey HN! Lev and Justin here, authors of PgDog (https://pgdog.dev/), a connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder for PostgreSQL. If you build apps with a lot of traffic, you know the first thing to break is the database. We are solving this with a network proxy that works without requiring application code changes or database migrations. Our post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099187 The most important update: we are in production. Sharding is used a lot, with direct-to-shard queries (one shard per query) working pretty much…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    PgDog▲227

    Scale PostgreSQL without changing your app

    Jul 2026 · pgdog.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    hey hn, supabase ceo here this is a postgres connection pooler. it’s similar to pgbouncer, but built with Elixir and specifically designed for multi-tenancy. it’s still under development, but it’s at a stage where we can gather a feedback from the community and you can try it yourself. we aren’t using this in production yet, but aiming to deploy it for a subset of databases in the next 2 months. We have the following benchmarks (details in the readme): - Elixir Cluster maintaining 400 connections to a single Postgres database - 1_000_000 clients connecting to the Elixir cluster - Sending…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    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 →

  5. 5

    A flamegraph generator for Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE output. - mgartner/pg_flame

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    A high-performance Postgres replication engine written in Rust. Embed it in your Rust application or run it as a standalone binary. - supabase/etl

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7AU

    pgMustard is a Postgres EXPLAIN visualisation tool that also gives performance advice, scored based on its potential to speed up your query.

    2019 · pgmustard.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey, Sam and the team from ElectricSQL here. PGlite is a WASM Postgres build packaged into a TypeScript/JavaScript client library, that enables you to run Postgres in the browser, Node.js and Bun, with no need to install any other dependencies. It's 3mb Gzipped, now has support for many Postgres extensions, including pgvector, and it has a reactive "live query" API. It's also fast, with CRUD style queries executing in under 0.3 ms, and larger, multi-row select queries occurring within a fraction of a single frame. PGlite started as an experimental project we shared on X, and the…

    2024 · pglite.dev · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Contribute to Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    In-memory Postgres for unit/E2E tests. Contribute to hexclave/pgmock development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN, I built pg-mcp, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for PostgreSQL that provides structured schema inspection and query execution for LLMs and agents. It's multi-tenant and runs over HTTP/SSE (not stdio) Features - Supports multiple database connections from multiple agents - Schema Introspection: Returns table structures, types, indexes and constraints; enriched with descriptions from pg_catalog. (for well documented databases) - Read-Only Queries: Controlled execution of queries via MCP. - EXPLAIN Tool: Helps smart agents optimize queries before execution. - Extension…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    pg_netstat is a Postgres extension to monitor database network traffic. It uses libpcap to capture packets and aggregates at user-specified interval.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    PostHog▲458

    An all-in-one product analytics suite you can self-host

    2021 · posthog.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hands-on tutorials to learn Postgres

    2022 · crunchydata.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    dockerized (postgres + nginx + golang + react). Contribute to karlkeefer/pngr development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16PA
  17. 17

    Postgres.js - The Fastest full featured PostgreSQL client for Node.js, Deno, Bun and CloudFlare - porsager/postgres

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    The future of serverless databases

    2025 · prisma.io · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN, Been hacking on a simple way to run agents entirely inside of a Postgres database, "an agent per row". Things you could build with this: * Your own agent orchestrator * A personal assistant with time travel * (more things I can't think of yet) Not quite there yet but thought I'd share it in its current state.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hello HN! Keeping Elasticsearch or Algolia in sync with Postgres is a pain when your data spans multiple tables. Traditional CDC tools like Debezium capture table-level events but don’t help when you need to index a full entity composed of related records. That's why I built PG-Capture. PG-Capture lets you define a schema as complex as you need, aggregate table-level events, and reconstruct structured objects spanning multiple tables. It then publishes them as meaningful domain-level events to any queue (RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.). PG-Capture does NOT replace Debezium, it works on top of it (or…

    2025 · pg-capture.onrender.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    hi hn, hydra ceo here hydra is an open source, column-oriented postgres. you can set up remarkably fast aggregates on your project in minutes to query billions of rows instantly. postgres is great, but aggregates can take minutes to hours to return results on large data sets. long-running analytical queries hog database resources and degrade performance. use hydra to run much faster analytics on postgres without making code changes. data is automatically loaded into columnar format and compressed. connect to hydra with your preferred postgres client (psql, dbeaver, etc). following 4 months…

    2023 · hydra-so.notion.site · its alternatives →

  22. 22PE
  23. 23

    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 →

  24. 24

    Logical multi-master PostgreSQL replication. Contribute to pgEdge/spock development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · 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 →

PgCat, Postgres pooler with sharding, load balancing and…