# DragonflyDB

5 Hacker News commenters recommended DragonflyDB and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A Redis-compatible in-memory database people run on a single VM and value for non-blocking snapshots. Critics report out-of-memory problems with large datasets and memory copying during snapshots.

## Why people recommend it

- Non-blocking snapshotting (1 comments): "which is not an issue with dargonfly for it's non-blocking snapshotting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50157727))
- Runs on a single VM (1 comments): "But I just use dragonflydb on a single VM. No point paying for transactions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798480))
- Named as a Redis alternative (1 comments): "dragonfly, garnet, and pogocache are other alternatives too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906923))

## What people warn about

- Out-of-memory crashes with large datasets (1 comments): "OOM was a big one, because when we had large dataset for example 96G on a 126G dragonfly pod" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155650))
- Snapshotting creates an in-memory copy (1 comments): "it created a copy within its memory before storing it to the disk" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50157425))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Redis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redis.md): 174 recommend
- [Valkey](https://hackerapproved.com/p/valkey.md): 31 recommend
- [Memcached](https://hackerapproved.com/p/memcached.md): 27 recommend
- [Lux Redis-compatible server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lux.md): 8 recommend
- [KiviDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kividb.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "DragonflyDB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/dragonfly/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).