Why Not Litestream?

Litestream is Awesome

Litestream is an excellent tool for SQLite replication. We use it extensively and highly recommend it. Walsync is heavily inspired by Litestream’s approach to WAL streaming.

Use Litestream when:

• You have a single database
• Battle-tested production stability is critical
• Your team is familiar with the Go ecosystem
• You want the most mature tooling

When Walsync Shines

Walsync was built for a specific use case: many SQLite databases on resource-constrained servers.

The Multi-Database Problem

Litestream runs one process per database. For a single database, this is fine:

Databases	Litestream Memory
1	~33 MB

But as you add databases, memory scales linearly:

Databases	Litestream	Walsync	Savings
1	33 MB	12 MB	21 MB
5	152 MB	14 MB	138 MB
10	286 MB	12 MB	274 MB
20	600 MB	12 MB	588 MB

On a 512MB Fly.io VM running 10 tenant databases, Litestream alone would consume over half your memory.

Multi-Tenant Architecture

If you’re running multi-tenant SQLite (like Turso, Tenement, or your own setup), walsync lets you back up all tenant databases with a single ~12MB process.

# Back up all tenant databases with one process
walsync watch \
  /var/lib/app/tenant1/app.db \
  /var/lib/app/tenant2/app.db \
  /var/lib/app/tenant3/app.db \
  -b s3://backups

Feature Comparison

Feature	Litestream	Walsync
WAL streaming	Yes	Yes
S3/compatible storage	Yes	Yes
Point-in-time restore	Yes	Yes
Multi-database	1 process each	Single process
Memory (10 DBs)	~286 MB	~12 MB
Compression	Built-in	Via SQLite extensions
Encryption	Not built-in	Via SQLite extensions
SHA256 checksums	Implicit	Explicit in S3 metadata
Maturity	Production-proven	Newer

The Right Tool

• 1-3 databases on a standard server: Use Litestream
• Many databases on a small server: Use walsync
• Multi-tenant SQLite: Use walsync

Both tools solve the same core problem (SQLite backup to S3) with different tradeoffs. Pick the one that fits your architecture.