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FlatBuffers Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to FlatBuffers
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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Apache Arrow
Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better FlatBuffers alternative or higher similarity.
FlatBuffers discussion
FlatBuffers reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of FlatBuffers.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-06.
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JSON vs Protocol Buffers vs FlatBuffers: A Deep Dive
FlatBuffers, also developed by Google, is a highly optimized serialization library designed for scenarios where zero-copy deserialization is required.
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Google discontinuing work on Dart macros
Oh how I enjoy trying to compile and use projects where they use some complex home brew codegen system often written in a different language entirely [1]. Luckily they often use Python as part of some core build step which never breaks compatability in their regex librwry [2].
Yes macros can be a pain and should be limited, but in my experience, a couple hundred lines of macros replaces many thousands of lines code generators with complicated baroque build system integrations (ahem ROS2). The tradeoff is even worse when the language supports templates and compile time operations which can usually replace macros with even less code and are easier to understand. Though at least Go supports codegen properly with support in its official tooling.
1: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/src/idl_ge...
- Go Protobuf: The New Opaque API
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JSON vs FlatBuffers vs Protocol Buffers
According to the official website:
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gRPC: The Bad Parts
> Protobuf is intentionally designed to NOT require any parsing at all.
As others have mentioned, this is simply not the case, and the VARINT encoding is a trivial counterexample.
It is this required decoding/parsing that (largely) distinguishes protobuf from Google's flatbuffers:
https://github.com/google/flatbuffers
https://flatbuffers.dev/
Cap'n Proto (developed by Kenton Varda, the former Google engineer who, while at Google, re-wrote/refactored Google's protobuf to later open source it as the library we all know today) is another example of zero-copy (de)serialization.
- FlatBuffers – an efficient cross platform serialization library for many langs
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Cap'n Proto 1.0
I don't work at Cloudflare but follow their work and occasionally work on performance sensitive projects.
If I had to guess, they looked at the landscape a bit like I do and regarded Cap'n Proto, flatbuffers, SBE, etc. as being in one category apart from other data formats like Avro, protobuf, and the like.
So once you're committed to record'ish shaped (rather than columnar like Parquet) data that has an upfront parse time of zero (nominally, there could be marshalling if you transmogrify the field values on read), the list gets pretty short.
https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto-flatbuffers-... goes into some of the trade-offs here.
Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/. That work (which Kenton has presumably done at Cloudflare since he's been employed there) eventually turned into Cloudflare workers.
Another consideration: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues/2#issuecomment-...
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Anyone has experience with reverse engineering flatbuffers?
Much more in the discussion of this particular issue onGitHub: flatbuffers:Reverse engineering #4258
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Flatty - flat message buffers with direct mapping to Rust types without packing/unpacking
Related but not Rust-specific: FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto.
- flatbuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 14 May 2025
Stats
Basic FlatBuffers repo stats
53
24,165
8.9
about 1 month ago
google/flatbuffers is an open source project licensed under Apache License 2.0 which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of FlatBuffers is C++.
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