Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Sandglass – Distributed, scalable, persistent time-sorted message queue

Sandglass is a distributed, horizontally scalable, persistent, time sorted message queue. - sandglass/sandglass

Sandglass is a distributed message queue system designed for developers who need to store and retrieve time-sorted messages at scale. It provides persistent storage and handles high-volume messaging with distributed… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Sandglass – Distributed, scalable, persistent time-sorted message queue launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   Deepstream.io – open-source real-time server with pub/sub and data sync▲301

   A realtime server for the modern web

   2016 · deepstream.io · its alternatives →

2. 2PD
   PicoMQ – Durable Streams over HTTP, on object storagefree▲159

   PicoMQ is a Rust server for Durable Streams, built on Object Store. Cheap, URL-addressable, granular streams (create/append/read/long-poll/SSE), with Pico Protocol or Durable Streams Protocol as the facade. S3Stream is the stream storage primitive, used in AutoMQ, shipped as a Rust library. Coordination is a command log in Postgres.

   Aug 2026 · picomq.com · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Parseable Log Storage▲79

   Over the past few months, we've been building Prism; a fast, developer-first observability UI that's deeply integrated with our open-source database, Parseable. Prism is designed for engineers who debug distributed systems, sometimes at odd hours, and need answers right now, without having to deal with five different tools. Backstory: We spoke to dozens of observability practitioners in large enterprises. Across the board, we heard two things: (1)The RoI on observability tools is hard to justify. (2)OSS leads to tool sprawl, metrics in Grafana, logs in ELK, traces… somewhere. We wanted a…

   2022 · parseable.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Distributed▲103

   Stay in sync with friends, family and colleagues

   2021 · its alternatives →

5. 5GA
   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 →

6. 6
   Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss▲177

   Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare. Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.

   Jan 2026 · getdock.io · its alternatives →

7. 7
   ByteNite▲206

   Hi HN, I’m one of the creators of ByteNite (https://bytenite.com). We built it for developers running compute-heavy containerized workloads (AI, ETL, batch jobs) who are frustrated with the limitations of traditional serverless platforms: timeouts, cold starts, orchestration complexity, and limited runtime control. ByteNite is a serverless platform that lets you submit distributed jobs packaged as Docker containers. You define simple or complex fan-out/fan-in logic, set your hardware requirements, and we handle the rest—distributing execution across warm cloud runners (CPUs,…

   2025 · docs.bytenite.com · its alternatives →

8. 8DL
   Distributed – Live social chat app to help remote teams stay in sync▲47

   2021 · joindistributed.com · its alternatives →

9. 9
   SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub▲217

   Scalable open source pub/sub SDK with support for RPC, JWT authentication and Kubernetes — optimized for async/await

   2016 · socketcluster.io · its alternatives →

10. 10
    Simple Mbtiles Server – Self-host the entire planet of OpenStreetMaps▲203

    simple mbtiles server. Contribute to markuman/sms development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

11. 11
    Wait.chat▲84

    Deadline-aware message inbox for async teams

    2020 · expireddomains.com · its alternatives →

12. 12
    ClearMesh▲61

    A Git-like platform for datasets, models, and binary folders

    May 2026 · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Tebi▲67

    Geo-distributed object storage solution

    2021 · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Nebula – a distributed graph database written in C++▲178

    A distributed, fast open-source graph database featuring horizontal scalability and high availability - GitHub - vesoft-inc/nebula: A distributed, fast open-source graph database featuring horizontal scalability and high availability

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

15. 15IB
    IPC between multiple Java processes/JVMs with nanosecond latency▲114

    2015 · mappedbus.io · its alternatives →

16. 16
    Skizze – High-throughput probabilistic data structure service▲53

    A probabilistic data structure service and storage - skizzehq/skizze

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

17. 17
    BoomFilters – Probabilistic data structures for processing streams▲70

    Probabilistic data structures for processing continuous, unbounded streams. - tylertreat/BoomFilters

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

18. 18
    Nubostore▲71

    Serverless, real-time data store with GraphQL and search

    2022 · its alternatives →

19. 19
    Denormalized – Embeddable Stream Processing in Rust and DataFusion▲125

    tl;dr we built an embeddable stream processing engine in Rust using apache DataFusion, check us out at https://github.com/probably-nothing-labs/denormalized Hey HN, We’d like to showcase a very early version of our embeddable stream processing engine called Denormalized. The rise of DuckDB has abundantly made it clear that even for many workloads of Terabyte scale, a single node system outshines the distributed query engines of previous generation such as Spark, Snowflake etc in terms of both performance and cost. Now a lot of workloads DuckDB is used for were normally…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

20. 20
    Jet – in-memory, fault-tolerant, distributed stream processing▲129

    Distributed Stream and Batch Processing. Contribute to hazelcast/hazelcast-jet development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

21. 21
    StorPool▲68

    Software-defined distributed storage.

    2014 · storpool.com · its alternatives →

22. 22
    A Go service that exposes a FIFO message queue in RAM▲17

    Microsecond message queues over HTTP and raw TCP — one static binary, zero dependencies, nothing to operate. - raiyanyahya/zapq

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    SwimOS Rust – A framework for real-time streaming data applications▲71

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    Await-Tree – Visualize Async Rust Task Execution in Real-Time▲28

    Generate accurate and informative tree dumps of asynchronous tasks. - risingwavelabs/await-tree

    2025 · github.com · its 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 →