Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to YAOS – A 1-click deploy, real-time sync engine for Obsidian
Hey HN, I'm a heavy Obsidian user. I recently got tired of the two usual sync tradeoffs: 1. File-based sync (iCloud/Dropbox/Syncthing) that leaves you waiting for changes to propagate, or hands you a "conflicted copy." 2. Self-hosted setups (like CouchDB) that need touching VMs and dockerized databases to sync markdown. So I built YAOS: a local-first, real-time sync engine for Obsidian. Self-hosting OSS should have better UX. You can deploy the backend to your own Cloudflare account in one click. It fits comfortably in Cloudflare's free tier (costing $0/month for normal…
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.
- 1OS
https://github.com/acheong08/obsidian-sync Hello HN, I'm a recent high school graduate and can't afford $8 per month for the official sync service, so I tried my hand at replicating the server. It's still missing a few features, such as file recovery and history, but the basic sync is working. To the creators of Obsidian.md: I'm probably violating the TOS, and I'm sorry. I'll take down the repository if asked. It's not ready for production and is highly inefficient; Not competition, so I hope you'll be lenient.
2023 · its alternatives →
- 2

A few months ago I noticed that I was quickly approaching my 10GB sync limit for my daily driver vault. I considered deprecating some of the heavier files and images, but I was worried how it would affect the integrity of my vault. Instead, I took the opportunity to think to myself -- what would the perfect vault look like? I began to write down some of the key philosophies and strategies I use in my driver vault which led to indispensable plugins, which led to more indispensable philosophies and on and on it went. I've chronicled these results into a fully working vault template that…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Calderafree▲197Your Obsidian vault as a living profile and linked garden
10d ago · caldera.social · its alternatives →
- 4

Modd.io is a collaborative game editor that runs in browser. It's kind of like Figma for game dev. We made this engine low-code and multiplayer-first, so developeres can quickly prototype casual multiplayer games. I hope some of you guys will find this useful. Would love to hear feedback also. Thank you. Engine Demo: https://www.modd.io
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5IM
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →
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- 7

Here's something I realized: the most AI-native knowledge base isn't a SaaS product with an API. It's a folder of markdown files on your disk. Obsidian stores everything as plain .md files. That means Claude Code (or any AI tool) can grep, read, write, and traverse your entire knowledge base with zero setup. No API keys. No OAuth. No middleware. Just local file I/O. The only missing piece was sync. I wanted my vault on iPhone (iCloud), on Mac (local), and on GitHub (backup + version history) — without paying $4/mo for Obsidian Sync. cc-md is ~400 lines of bash. iCloud handles Apple…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Local-first collaboration SDK for React, Vue, and Svelte. Batteries-included: Rich text, undo/redo, cursors, and presence. - Dancode-188/synckit
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Hi HN! Sina here. i wanted to share this open source project (apache 2.0) that i've been working on for the past month or so. it's called hotcell and it lets you create/pause/manage sandboxes on any device (your laptop, linux vm, bare metal). i've tested it against various benchmarks that i found on computesdk (https://www.computesdk.com/benchmarks/sandboxes/) as well as the one shared by dax (cofounder of open code) on twitter recently (link to his original thread and my reply https://x.com/sinasanm/status/2078158598996443346) and…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hi HN, I'm Adriano, one of the makers of Vaultrice. I'm excited (and a little nervous!) to share what we've been building. For years, we found ourselves in a frustrating loop: whenever we needed a simple real-time feature—like a "who's online" list, a collaborative app, or just sharing state between a marketing site and our main app — we'd end up spending days setting up the same stack or discarded to do it. Setting it up, it always involved wiring together a database, a WebSocket server, an API, and managing the connection state. It felt like massive overkill for what we were trying to…
2025 · vaultrice.com · its alternatives →
- 11

Hi HN, I built this simple command-line tool to solve a specific pain point in Obsidian plugin development. As a new plugin developer, I didn't like the idea of manually copying files from my development directory to the Obsidian vault every time I made changes. Obsidian Plugin Sync automates this process with a single command. It: - Detects plugin ID from manifest.json - Optionally builds your plugin before syncing - Copies the necessary files to your Obsidian vault - Provides a watch mode for continuous syncing during development The tool has zero dependencies beyond Python for basic…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

an opinionated blueprint for deploying Forgejo in an OrbStack VM with Ubuntu, PostgreSQL and the tsbridge reverse proxy - highpost/forgejo-appliance
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
- 14AW
I’ve spent the last few days prototyping a browser-based game engine stack designed for instant-load, "Roblox-for-Teens" style deployment. The goal is to lower the floor for AA indie devs who want high-fidelity physics and instant web distribution without the overhead of Unity or a heavy Godot export. The Stack Engine: A headless WASM/WebGPU implementation. I’m currently using custom flags and selective streaming to bypass standard browser memory and execution limits. Physics: I’ve ported Jolt (Guerrilla Games) but modified the solver to mimic the original Blam! engine (Bungie/Halo…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 15

I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16AM
Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…
2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io · its alternatives →
- 17

Self-hosted Obsidian sync for iOS via Syncthing
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
N2O Sync▲2True bidirectional content sync for Notion and Obsidian
Jul 2026 · n2osync.com · its alternatives →
- 19

I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net · its alternatives →
- 21SG
Hi HN! We built a SaaS platform to do what we've always wanted and have a Google Docs-like experience without leaving Obsidian. In the process we found a way to enable web access and get non-markdown file sync, too. There's a one-week free trial if you're interested in trying it out, and I'm happy to answer questions about CRDTs, Elixir, or the other backing tech, too.
2025 · screen.garden · its alternatives →
- 22

It took me about a week to vibe code this 3D game engine with Opus 4.6 that I intend to use as a replacement for Three.js and React Three Fiber in my browser MMORPG, Mana Blade. I was not expecting to be able to reach that point so easily, but pretty much every feature took somewhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour - 1 to 3 prompts on average. It is vibe-coded in the sense that I haven't looked at the code, but I am very careful with my prompts and constantly have Claude reviewing the codebase, looking for performance and code quality improvements. It can reach 2000 draw calls on recent…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Obsidian▲8Deno's first native GraphQL caching client and server module
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

This was an interesting porting project for a few reasons (IMO): - The original game is/was awesome and, from a programming perspective, a wonder -- smooth scrolling arcade game on a 128kb Mac in 1984... - The port was done with a lot of help from AI (mostly Claude Code, but some Gemini CLI as well). I'm a programmer; it wasn't vibe-coded. But I couldn't have done the port of 68k assembly without it. FWIW, Claude seemed better at actually porting the 68k assembly but Gemini was better at finding bugs. YMMV. - I love Redux and Redux Toolkit for state management. For the port, I put the…
2025 · continuumjs.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 →