Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Walrus – a Kafka alternative written in Rust

🦭 Distributed log streaming engine built from first principles - nubskr/walrus

Walrus is a Kafka alternative built with Rust, designed for developers who need message streaming and event processing capabilities. It offers a Rust-based approach to handling distributed messaging, positioning itself… 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.

1
WAL Implementation in Golang▲59
I wrote this simple WAL library in Golang that I use to write data that my kafka producer fails due to errors like Broker going down or some other issue. Took inspiration from etcd/wal
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
2AL
A Lightweight Kafka Alternative▲6
www.github.com/nubskr/walrus
Nov 2025 · its alternatives →
3
Kameo – Fault-tolerant async actors built on Tokio▲105
Hi HN, I’m excited to share Kameo, a lightweight Rust library that helps you build fault-tolerant, distributed, and asynchronous actors. If you're working on distributed systems, microservices, or real-time applications, Kameo offers a simple yet powerful API for handling concurrency, panic recovery, and remote messaging between nodes. Key Features: - Async Rust: Each actor runs as a separate Tokio task, making concurrency management simple. - Remote Messaging: Seamlessly send messages to actors across different nodes. - Supervision and Fault Tolerance: Create self-healing systems with actor…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
4PD
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 →
5
Hocus – self-hosted alternative to GitHub Codespaces using Firecracker▲291
🪄 Spin up ready-to-code, disposable dev environments on your own servers. Self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces. - hocus-dev/hocus
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
UI for Apache Kafka▲158
Open-Source Web UI for Apache Kafka Management. Contribute to provectus/kafka-ui development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
DuckDB for Kafka Stream Processing▲77
Hello Everyone! We built SQLFlow as a lightweight stream processing engine. We leverage DuckDB as the stream processing engine, which gives SQLFlow the ability to process 10's of thousands of messages a second using ~250MiB of memory! DuckDB also supports a rich ecosystem of sinks and connectors! https://sql-flow.com/docs/category/tutorials/ https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow We were tired of running JVM's for simple stream processing, and also of bespoke one off stream processors I would love your feedback, criticisms and/or…
Dec 2025 · sql-flow.com · its alternatives →
8
Open-source serverless security lake powered by Rust + Apache Iceberg▲63
Open source security data lake for threat hunting, detection & response, and cybersecurity analytics at petabyte scale on AWS - matanolabs/matano
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Rivet Actors – Durable Objects built with Rust, FoundationDB, Isolates▲133
Hello! We posted a Show HN for Rivet last year for our container orchestration project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188659). In that time, a lot has changed that I think HN will find interesting. Rivet is open-source actor infrastructure similar to Cloudflare's Durable Objects. Rivet itself already serves millions of MAU in production using our current container runtime – primarily for multiplayer games – and Rivet Actors are a new extension to support actor-like workloads. Rivet Actor's core primitives are RPC, state, and events. Actors are powered by Rust, V8…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
10
OpenObserve – Elasticsearch/Datadog alternative▲198
Hello folks, We are launching OpenObserve. An open source Elasticsearch/Splunk/Datadog alternative written in rust and vue that is super easy to get started with and has 140x lower storage cost compared to elasticsearch. It offers logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, functions (run aws lambda like functions during ingestion and query to enrich, redact, transform, normalize and whatever else you want to do. Think redacting email IDs from logs, adding geolocation based on IP address, etc). You can do all of this from the UI, no messing up with configuration files. OpenObserve…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
Monitaur▲144
Datadog for Web3
2023 · its alternatives →
12
Kubetail – Real-time log search for Kubernetes▲126
Hi Everyone! Kubetail is a general-purpose logging dashboard for Kubernetes, optimized for tailing logs across multi-container workloads in real-time. With Kubetail, you can view logs from all the containers in a workload (e.g. Deployment or DaemonSet) merged into a single chronological timeline, delivered to your browser or terminal. I launched Kubetail on HN last year and at that time the top request was to add search. Now I'm happy to say we finally have search available in our latest official release (cli/v0.4.3, helm/v0.10.1). You can check it out in action here:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
Kafka 0.8.0 on Cloudflare Workers▲148
Kafka 0.8.0 broker implementation on top of Cloudflare Workers - maxwellpeterson/kafka-worker
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
SwimOS Rust – A framework for real-time streaming data applications▲71
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
StreamHouse – S3-native Kafka alternative written in Rust▲10
Hey HN, I built StreamHouse, an open-source streaming platform that replaces Kafka's broker-managed storage with direct S3 writes. The goal: same semantics, fraction of the cost. How it works: Producers batch and compress records, a stateless server manages partition routing and metadata (SQLite for dev, PostgreSQL for prod), and segments land directly in S3. Consumers read from S3 with a local segment cache. No broker disks to manage, no replication factor to tune — S3 gives you 11 nines of durability out of the box. What's there today: - Producer API with batching, LZ4 compression, and…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Columnar store for fast, lightweight logging▲15
Founder here, Parseable is a lightweight log ingestion and query engine written in Rust. Parseable can ingest data from existing logging agents (FluentBit, LogStash, Vector, syslog-ng and more) using HTTP + JSON output. Ingested logs are stored as semi-indexed Parquet files (on disk or S3). You can query the data with builtin query engine using SQL or use a query engines of choice like Spark, Presto, Trino and so on. We also developed a Grafana data source plugin that lets you visualise log data via Grafana. Sample dashboard link in readme. As log data grew, our industry has responded with…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
I quit my job to build a Kubernetes GUI with Rust▲13
About a year ago I was working on a project with mirrored Kubernetes clusters deployed across various regions. Constantly switching contexts was a big pain for me and I badly needed something more practical to work with multiple clusters, ideally simultaneously. At that time everyone was talking about Rust and I really wanted to try it out. I then found Tauri, a framework to build GUI apps with Rust + JavaScript. I was sold. I learned Rust and built the app I always wanted to use. Fast, lightweight and with the ability to connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. Fast forward to today,…
2023 · aptakube.com · its alternatives →
18DJ
Dassana. JSON-native,schema-less logging solution built atop ClickHouse▲25
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 →
19
C++ AWS MSK IAM Auth Implementation – Goodbye Kafka Passwords▲50
In 2023, AWS announced[1] IAM authentication for MSK Kafka clusters with support for "all programming languages"… except C++. While Java[2], Python[3], Go[4], and others got official SDKs, C++ developers/vendors were stuck hardcoding SCRAM-SHA credentials in code/configs or relying on heavier Java-based tools like Kafka Connect or Apache Flink. Later, community projects added Rust[5] and Ruby[6] support. Why no C++? Rust might be the new favorite, but C++ is still king for high-performance data systems: minimal dependencies, lean resource use, and raw speed. At Timeplus, we needed…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
UnisonDB – Log-native KV database that replicates like a message bus▲17
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…
Nov 2025 · unisondb.io · its alternatives →
21
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 →
22
KDash▲76
A simple terminal dashboard for Kubernetes built with Rust
2021 · kdash.cli.rs · its alternatives →
23
AutoMQ - A Cost-Effective Kafka Distro That Can Autoscale in Seconds▲58
Diskless Kafka® on S3. 10x Cost-Effective. No Cross-AZ Traffic Cost. Autoscale in seconds. Single-digit ms latency. Multi-AZ Availability. - AutoMQ/automq
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
24AF
Apache Fory Rust – 10-20x faster serialization than JSON/Protobuf▲67
Serialization framework with some interesting numbers: 10-20x faster on nested objects than json/protobuf. Technical approach: compile-time codegen (no reflection), compact binary protocol with meta-packing, little-endian layout optimized for modern CPUs. Unique features that other fast serializers don't have: - Cross-language without IDL files (Rust ↔ Python/Java/Go) - Trait object serialization (Box) - Automatic circular reference handling - Schema evolution without coordination Happy to discuss design trade-offs. Benchmarks:…
Oct 2025 · fory.apache.org · 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 →