Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Pq – Simple, durable background tasks in Python using Postgres
At work we were using python-rq for background tasks. It does the job for simple things, but we kept bumping into limitations. We needed to schedule tasks hours / days out and trust they'd survive a restart. We wanted periodic tasks with proper overlap control. So we built a scheduling / enqueuing system around Postgres to bring these durability capabilities to python-rq. This worked fine for a while but was trickier to reason about due to its more complicated architecture (we'd run two separate services just for getting jobs from Postgres into the rq Redis queue, plus N actual…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1

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 →
- 2

A lightweight message queue. Like AWS SQS and RSMQ but on Postgres. - pgmq/pgmq
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3

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 →
- 41R
2016 · magic.io · its alternatives →
- 5

Kafka-based Job Queue for Python. Contribute to joowani/kq development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

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 →
- 7

Modern scheduling library for Python. Contribute to Miksus/rocketry development by creating an account on GitHub.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

- 9

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 →
- 10

yotaq - Your Own Task Queue for Python. Contribute to JoseTomasTocino/yotaq development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11

Hi everyone — thanks for your interest in PRQL — let us know any questions or feedback! We're excited to be releasing 0.2[1], the first version of PRQL you can use in your own projects. It wouldn't exist without the feedback we got from HackerNews when we originally posted the proposal. [1]: https://github.com/prql/prql/releases/tag/0.2.0
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

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 →
- 13

Open source IDE plugins for programmers.
2022 · wakatime.com · its alternatives →
- 14

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 →
- 15

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 →
- 16

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 →
- 17

Contribute to Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Simple Python Calculation Engine. Contribute to bsdz/calcengine development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

- 20

How to use PostgreSQL's LISTEN/NOTIFY as a simple message queue with psycopg2 and asyncio - listen.py
2020 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 21

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 →
- 22

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 →
- 23

Hi! I've built this because I kept reaching for Celery for simple scheduled tasks and it felt like overkill. I just needed "run this function every hour" or "daily at 9am", not distributed workers. So it's decorators for scheduling (@scheduler.every(5).minutes, @scheduler.daily.at("09:00")), state saves to JSON so jobs survive restarts, and there's an optional FastAPI dashboard if you want to see what's running. No Redis, no message broker, runs in-process with your app. Trade-off is it's single process only — if you need distributed workers, stick with Celery.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Quantopian Remote Debugger for Python. Contribute to quantopian/qdb development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- PgQueuer – Transform PostgreSQL into a Job Queue alternatives
- An SQS Alternative on Postgres alternatives
- Hatchet – Open-source distributed task queue alternatives
- 1M rows/s from Postgres to Python alternatives
- KQ – Simple Job Queue for Python Using Kafka alternatives
- Drop-in SQS replacement based on SQLite 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 →