Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to UnisonDB – Log-native KV database that replicates like a message bus
Hi HN, For the past few months, I’ve been building UnisonDB — a log-native database where the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) is the database, not just a recovery mechanism. I started this because every time I needed data to flow — from core to edge, or between datacenters — I ended up gluing together a KV database + CDC + Kafka. It worked, but it always felt like overkill: too many moving parts for even small workloads, and too little determinism. What is it? UnisonDB unifies storage and streaming into a single log-based core. Every write is: • Durable (appended to the WAL), • Ordered (globally…
UnisonDB is a log-native key-value database that combines storage and streaming into a single system. Built around a write-ahead log that serves as the database itself rather than just a recovery mechanism, it… 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.
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Hi everyone — I’m the developer of UnisonDB, an open-source log-native database built in Go for distributed and edge-scale systems. UnisonDB rethinks the boundary between databases and streaming systems. Instead of treating the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) as a recovery mechanism, it treats the log itself as the database. Every write is immediately durable, queryable, and replicable — without Kafka, CDC pipelines, or changefeed daemons. UnisonDB unifies persistence and streaming in one system. It’s designed for real-time, event-driven, and edge-first workloads where data needs to move as fast as…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey there HN! We’re Joe and Stopa, and today we’re open sourcing InstantDB, a client-side database that makes it easy to build real-time and collaborative apps like Notion and Figma. Building modern apps these days involves a lot of schleps. For a basic CRUD app you need to spin up servers, wire up endpoints, integrate auth, add permissions, and then marshal data from the backend to the frontend and back again. If you want to deliver a buttery smooth user experience, you’ll need to add optimistic updates and rollbacks. We do these steps over and over for every feature we build, which can…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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🦭 Distributed log streaming engine built from first principles - nubskr/walrus
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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InstantDB▲320Complete backend with auth and storage in one prompt
Apr 2026 · instantdb.com · its alternatives →
- 5PS
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 →
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- 7TA
2020 · terminusdb.com · its alternatives →
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A realtime server for the modern web
2016 · deepstream.io · its alternatives →
- 9DA
Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…
2023 · driftdb.com · its alternatives →
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Distributed NoSQL Database. Contribute to stephenmcd/curiodb development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11DJ
Hello HN, I’m Gaurav. Founder & CEO of Dassana. We are coming out of stealth today and would like to invite the community to give us a try. https://lake.dassana.io/ First, a bit of a backstory. I grew up with grep to search log files. The kind of person whose grep was aliased to grep -i. Then came along Splunk. It was a game-changer. For every single start-up I started (there are a few) I used Splunk and quite often we will run out of our ingestion quota. SumoLogic wasn’t cheaper either so we looked into DataDog. It was good until we started running issues with aggregate…
2022 · its alternatives →
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A totally proof-of-concept FoundationDB based network block device backend - dividuum/fdb-nbd
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13PD
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 →
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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 →
- 15AB
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 →
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a minimal versioned log structured relational DB in Common Lisp - GitHub - codr7/whirlog: a minimal versioned log structured relational DB in Common Lisp
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi Hacker News! We're Jan & Wilco from ReJot (https://rejot.dev). With ReJot we're building a framework that turns the write-ahead log of your database into an asynchronous communication channel for your services. ReJot enables application developers to define how the database tables they own should be replicated to other databases. Something we wish we had at in our previous job at a large fintech. There is a gap between building internal (REST) APIs and Kafka (event streaming) to share data between services. Internal APIs start to break down when you have more than a couple…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, We've been experimenting with a real-time, version-controlled NoDB for Deno & React called GoatDB. The idea is to remove backend complexity while keeping apps fast, offline-resilient, and easy to self-host. Runs on the client – No backend required, incremental queries keep things efficient. Self-hosted & lightweight – Deploy a single executable, no server stack needed. Offline-first & resilient – Clients work independently & can restore state after server outages. Edge-native & fast – Real-time sync happens locally with minimal overhead. Why We Built It: We needed something that’s…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN, We have been building SyncLite, an open-source platform to simplify offline-first application development. If your application uses SQLite or DuckDB, SyncLite lets it continue using the local database as usual while synchronization happens in the background. For SQL-based applications, SyncLite records transactions into transactionally consistent .sqlog files using SQLite as an open replication format. A background consolidator replays those transactions, derives row-level CDC and schema changes, and applies them transactionally to destination databases like PostgreSQL. The same…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey, everyone. I am currently working on AllyDB, which is basically my own Redis, which I am writing in Elixir. Currently, the database is nowhere close to being ready, as you can see in the roadmap, but I am doing my best to add stuff as fast as possible. Currently the implementation is very simple, with an in memory table, an append log persistence system, as well as an interval persistence system as a backup. The database could definitely be optimized further, especially when it comes to persistence, which I am planning to do in the future. I'm also planning to use Rust NIFs for specific…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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TerminusDB is a distributed, collaborative database designed for building, sharing, versioning, and reasoning on structured data. - terminusdb/terminusdb
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
EnterpriseDB (“EDB”), the leader in accelerating Postgres® in the enterprise, today announced its acquisition of Splitgraph, an early-stage disruptor that provides a Postgres compatible serverless SQL API for building data driven applications from hundreds of datasources. This move is seen as a mean
2020 · splitgraph.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I built Ayder — a single-binary, HTTP-native durable event log written in C. The wedge is simple: curl is the client (no JVM, no ZooKeeper, no thick client libs). There’s a 2-minute demo that starts with an unclean SIGKILL, then restarts and verifies offsets + data are still there. Numbers (3-node Raft, real network, sync-majority writes, 64B payload): ~50K msg/s sustained (wrk2 @ 50K req/s), client P99 ~3.46ms. Crash recovery after SIGKILL is ~40–50s with ~8M offsets. Repo link has the video, benchmarks, and quick start. I’m looking for a few early design partners (any…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi HN, I’m Ignacio, founder at Basekick Labs. Over the past months I’ve been building Arc, a time-series data platform designed to combine very fast ingestion with strong analytical queries. What Arc does? Ingest via a binary MessagePack API (fast path), Compatible with Line Protocol for existing tools (Like InfluxDB, I'm ex Influxer), Store data as Parquet with hourly partitions, Query via DuckDB engine using SQL Why I built it: Many systems force you to trade retention, throughput, or complexity. I wanted something where ingestion performance doesn’t kill your analytics. Performance &…
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 →