Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Starskey – Fast Persistent Key-Value Store (Inspired by LevelDB)

Hey everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. I thought I'd share a new open source Go project I started. It’s called Starskey! I’ve been diligently studying database internals, data structures, and more for almost two years now, writing many different things. This open-source key-value store is built on top of a log-structured merge tree, inspired by WiscKey and LevelDB. It's fairly fast, durable and rather efficient. It's meant to provide you a persistent embedded storage option for binary key value pairs. Github https://github.com/starskey-io/starskey Web…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
Badger – an embeddable, persistent key-value store written in Go▲88
Fast key-value DB in Go. Contribute to dgraph-io/badger development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
CaskDB – project to teach you building a key value store▲175
(educational) build your own disk based KV store. Contribute to avinassh/py-caskdb development by creating an account on GitHub.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
ToplingDB - A Persistent Key-Value Store for External Storage▲73
As the creator of TerarkDB (acquired by ByteDance in 2019), I have developed ToplingDB in recent years. ToplingDB is forked from RocksDB, where we have replaced almost all components with more efficient alternatives(db_bench shows ToplingDB is about ~8x faster than RocksDB): * MemTable: SkipList is replaced by CSPP(Crash Safe Parallel Patricia trie), which is 8x faster. * SST: BlockBasedTable is replaced by ToplingZipTable, implemented by searchable compression algo, it is very small and fast, typically less than 1μs per lookup: * Keys/Indexes are compressed using NestLoudsTrie(a…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
A Database Written in Golang▲277
Recently created a minimal persistent relational database in Go. Main focus was on implementing & understanding working the of database, storage management & transaction handling. Use of B+ Tree for storage engine(support for indexing), managing a Free List (for reusing nodes), Support for transactions, Concurrent Reads. Still have many things to add & fix like query processing being one of the main & fixing some bugs Repo link - https://github.com/Sahilb315/AtomixDB Would love to hear your thoughts
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
WildcatDB – A persistent key-value store built for concurrency▲13
Hey everyone! I hope you’re all having a great day. Today I’m sharing an experimental open-source project I’ve been working on for the past few months called Wildcat. Wildcat is an embedded persistent storage engine implementing an lsm tree similar to RocksDB and or LevelDB. The motivation for this system was to try to solve the multi-writer bottlenecks that most embedded systems incur. With that, during my journey with storage systems especially the log structured flavour I’ve implemented a lot of interesting optimizations and algorithms in regards to the write and read paths. I hope you…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
A hash array-mapped trie implementation in C▲171
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
7AB
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 →
8
Godb is a simple Go ORM for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and SQL Server▲205
A Go SQL query builder and struct mapper. Contribute to samonzeweb/godb development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
A proof-of-concept FoundationDB based network block device backend▲192
A totally proof-of-concept FoundationDB based network block device backend - dividuum/fdb-nbd
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
10KV
Key/Value Store as-a-Service▲70
2017 · keyvalue.xyz · its alternatives →
11
Simple in-memory key/value store written in Elixir using Shards▲80
Simple in-memory Key/Value Store written in Elixir using `cabol/ex_shards` - cabol/kvx
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
voidDB – A transactional key-value DB written in Go for 64-bit Linux▲67
A transactional key-value database written in Go for Linux and macOS - voidDB/voidDB
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
SpacetimeDB – A database that replaces your server▲80
We just released our database, SpacetimeDB, on GitHub under the BSL 1.1 license. It converts to a free software license after a few years. The point of the database is that you upload application logic into the database as a WebAssembly stored procedure, so instead of clients connecting to a webserver they connect directly to the database. The database itself does authentication and you write your own authorization logic just like you would inside a webserver. We’ve developed our game, BitCraft (https://bitcraftonline.com) entirely in this way. All of the game state is stored and…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Fist – Persistent Full Text Search and Indexing Server Written in C▲124
A lightweight full-text index server with a focus on speed and efficiency. - GitHub - f-prime/fist: A lightweight full-text index server with a focus on speed and efficiency.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
15RA
RedixDB – a fast persistent key-value store with the Redis protocol▲75
a very simple pure key => value storage system that speaks Redis protocol with Postgres as storage engine and more
2018 · alash3al.github.io · its alternatives →
16
IronDB – a resilient key-value store for the browser▲73
IronDB is now ImmortalDB: https://github.com/gruns/ImmortalDB - gruns/irondb
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
Keeper – embedded secret store for Go (help me break it)▲64
Keeper is an embeddable secret store (Argon2id, XChaCha20-Poly1305 by default). Four security levels, audit chains, crash-safe rotation. Vault is overkill for most use cases. This is for when you ge paranoid about env and need encrypted local storage that doesn't suck. No security through obscurity, hence, It's still early, so now's the best time to find weird edge cases, race conditions, memory leaks, crypto misuse, anything that breaks. The README has a full security model breakdown if you want to get adversarial.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
18
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 →
19
Dat-keyserver: a distributed PGP keyserver based on the Dat protocol▲106
a distributed PGP keyserver project based on the dat protocol - tdjsnelling/dat-keyserver
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)▲71
Hi HN, I'm Emilie, I have a literature background (which explains the well-written documentation!) and I've been learning Rust and distributed systems by building minikv over the past few months. It recently got featured in Programmez! magazine: https://www.programmez.com/actualites/minikv-un-key-value-st... minikv is an open-source, distributed storage engine built for learning, experimentation, and self-hosted setups. It combines a strongly-consistent key-value database (Raft), S3-compatible object storage, and basic multi-tenancy. Features/highlights: - Raft…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
go-storage▲86
An application-oriented unified storage layer for Golang.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
Tinykv – Minimal file-backed key-value store for Rust▲24
I built tinykv because I kept reaching for simple persistent storage in Rust projects but found existing solutions either too complex (sled) or unmaintained (pickledb). tinykv focuses on simplicity: JSON-based, serde-powered, with optional TTL. Perfect for CLI tools, game saves, config storage. Would appreciate any feedback from the HN community!
2025 · crates.io · its alternatives →
23
Bugfruit – a simple embedded key-value store▲6
Hey HN! I work on a database for my day-job and I realized I had never written one from scratch, so I wrote bugfruit! Once I was mostly satisfied with it, I looked up some benchmarks to compare my simple database to other brand name key-value stores. I was surprised to see that mine held up fairly well on the subset of benchmarks I replicated. So I used the Pavlo Database Naming System [0] to name it and open-sourced the code. I'd love to hear any feedback you might have on it! [0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2020/03/on-naming-a-datab...
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
24BA
BerylDB – a small key-value database▲57
2021 · docs.beryl.dev · its alternatives →

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