HeliosProxy vs pgagroal

HeliosProxy is a self-hosted, programmable PostgreSQL data-plane for routing connections, handling failover, replaying traffic, and supporting database upgrades. It provides session, transaction, and statement pooling, with multiplexing up to 100:1. Routing can account for replica lag, workload type, and failing backends through circuit breaking. Cache options include local memory, Redis-backed storage, and semantic tiers, with invalidation when writes occur. Transaction Replay can move sessions to a new primary and optionally replay reads or transactions when conditions permit, although prepared statements, temporary tables, open cursors, advisory locks, and extended-protocol SET statements are not restored. A WebAssembly plugin runtime offers five hook points, Ed25519 verification, and OCI distribution. The admin console includes topology, plugin, chaos, shadow-execution, and traffic-replay panels. Authentication supports JWT, OAuth 2.0, LDAP, and API keys. HeliosProxy works with PostgreSQL 12+ and compatible databases, and deployment documentation covers Docker, Kubernetes, and standalone setups. It is open source under Apache 2.0 and costs nothing.

pgagroal is a free, self-hosted PostgreSQL connection pool for Linux and macOS. It supports per-user and per-database connection limits, pool prefill, idle connection removal, and connection validation. Administrators can enable or disable database access and choose graceful or fast shutdown. Remote management and command-line tools handle runtime administration and user management. Monitoring exports Prometheus metrics and includes a Grafana 12 dashboard. Authentication can use database-backed queries or a user vault for credentials. If a PostgreSQL server can no longer accept writes, pgagroal can trigger an external failover workflow. The project lists TLS v1.2+ and describes both server-only and mutual certificate authentication. It works with PostgreSQL-compliant drivers including pgjdbc, Npgsql, and pq. Tested systems listed include Fedora 38+, RHEL 9.x, Rocky Linux 9.x, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD; releases list packages through Fedora 42/43, RHEL 10, and Rocky Linux 10. The repository identifies a BSD-3-Clause license. GitHub is used for questions, issues, feature requests, and code contributions.