Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app

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…

PgDog is a network proxy for PostgreSQL that combines connection pooling, load balancing, and database sharding. It allows applications handling high traffic to scale their databases without modifying application code… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
PgDog▲227
Scale PostgreSQL without changing your app
Jul 2026 · pgdog.dev · its alternatives →
2
PgCat, Postgres pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover▲233
PostgreSQL pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover support. - postgresml/pgcat
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
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 →
4
Supavisor – a Postgres connection pooler written in Elixir▲149
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 →
5
pg_flame – flamegraph visualizations of PostgreSQL query plans▲321
A flamegraph generator for Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE output. - mgartner/pg_flame
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
pg_netstat, a Postgres extension to monitor database network traffic▲158
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 →
7
Postgres as a VectorDB GUI▲162
Contribute to Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
Pg_replicate – Build Postgres replication applications in Rust▲216
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 →
9AU
A user interface for Postgres EXPLAIN that also gives tips▲50
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 →
10
Postgres.js – Fastest Full-Featured PostgreSQL Client for Node and Deno▲257
Postgres.js - The Fastest full featured PostgreSQL client for Node.js, Deno, Bun and CloudFlare - porsager/postgres
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
BemiDB – Postgres read replica optimized for analytics▲209
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 →
12OA
OtterTune – Automated Database Tuning Service for RDS MySQL/Postgres▲164
Yo. OtterTune is a database optimization service. It uses machine learning to automatically tune your MySQL and Postgres configuration (i.e., RDS parameter groups) to improve performance and reduce costs. It does this by only looking at your database's runtime metrics (e.g., INNODB_METRICS, pg_stat_database, CloudWatch). We don't need to examine sensitive queries or user tables. We spun this project out of my research group at Carnegie Mellon University in 2020. This week we've announced that OtterTune is now available to the public. We are offering everyone a starter account to try it out…
2021 · its alternatives →
13
Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server▲167
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 →
14PE
Pg-extend-rs – Easy Postgres extensions in Rust▲244
2018 · bluejekyll.github.io · its alternatives →
15PS
Peerdb Streams – Simple, native Postgres change data capture▲177
Hello HN, I am Sai Srirampur, one of the Co-founders of PeerDB. (https://github.com/PeerDB-io/peerdb). We spent the past 7 months building a solid experience to replicate data from Postgres to data warehouses. Now we're expanding to queues. PeerDB Streams provides a simple and native way to replicate changes as they happen in Postgres to Queues (Kafka, Redpanda, Google PubSub, etc). We use Postgres logical decoding to enable Change Data Capture (CDC). Blog post here: https://blog.peerdb.io/peerdb-streams-simple-native-postgres.... 10-min quickstart here:…
2024 · its alternatives →
16
Serverless Postgres▲159
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 →
17NP
New Postgres Connection Pooling Extension Breaks 100k Barrier▲11
If you’ve ever dealt with scaling PostgreSQL, you know the traditional process-per-connection model just doesn’t cut it when you're handling massive numbers of connections, particularly short-lived ones. When I led architecture at The Meet Group, which had one of the largest deployments of Postgres in the world, we optimized everything: connection pools in the app tier, as a man-in-the-middle, and even on the database server. It ran great, but it was a pain in the ass to manage and debug. Now, as co-founder and CEO of NEXTGRES, I've been working on a better and more seamless solution:…
2024 · medium.com · its alternatives →
18
PG-Capture – a better way to sync Postgres with Algolia (or Elastic)▲56
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 →
19
Software Engineering Daily - Scaling PostgreSQL▲70
A look at modern database approaches and how Citus scales PG
2016 · softwareengineeringdaily.com · its alternatives →
20
Postgres Playground▲161
Hands-on tutorials to learn Postgres
2022 · crunchydata.com · its alternatives →
21
Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL▲48
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 →
22
PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types▲97
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 →
23IB
I built this Postgres logger▲94
Hey HN, Some of you were really interested in Postgres logging with pgAudit in my previous post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082827 So I built this logger: https://rocketgraph.io/logger-demo using pgAudit to show you what can be done with Postgres auditing. It offers some powerful features like "get me all the CREATE queries that ran in the past hour". These are generated by AWS RDS Instance running on my Rocketgraph account. Then they are forwarded to Cloudwatch for complex querying. In the future we can connect these logs to slack so you can…
2023 · rocketgraph.io · its alternatives →
24
Postgres query lock explainer▲143
This is like 4 years old, but I’m braver now and ready to share stuff with this community. I’ve been a lurker for a while. I made this tool - it’s kind of like “explain” but it tells you about what locks would be required by the query. I was making it as part of a larger tool that would try to prevent deadlocks during migrations at my last company, I never finished it.
2023 · 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 →