LocalStack's community edition required an auth token starting March 2026 and froze security updates. Floci is the MIT-licensed, no-auth, drop-in replacement.
Everything you need to know before switching, summarized in two cards.
All 27 feature dimensions compared across every category — pricing, performance, services, SDKs, and IaC.
| Feature | Floci | LocalStack Community |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing & Licensing | ||
| Price | Free forever | Auth token required (since March 2026) |
| CI/CD usage | Unlimited | Auth token required / restricted |
| License | MIT | Restricted / BSL |
| Security updates | ✓ Active | ✗ Frozen (March 2026) |
| Performance | ||
| Startup time | ~24 ms | ~3.3 s |
| Idle memory | ~13 MiB | ~143 MiB |
| Docker image size | ~90 MB | ~1.0 GB |
| Native binary | ✓ ~40 MB | ✗ JVM only |
| Compute Services | ||
| Lambda (Docker runtimes) | ✓ Full — real containers | ✓ Partial |
| ECS (clusters, services, tasks) | ✓ Real Docker tasks | ✗ Not available |
| EKS (clusters + real k3s) | ✓ Live k8s API | ✗ Not available |
| EC2 (Docker + IMDS + SSH + UserData) | ✓ Real containers | ✗ Not available |
| CodeBuild (real buildspec execution) | ✓ Real Docker builds | ✗ Not available |
| CodeDeploy (Lambda traffic shifting) | ✓ Full + auto-rollback | ✗ Not available |
| Data & Storage | ||
| S3 (versioning, Object Lock, events) | ✓ Full | ✓ Partial |
| DynamoDB + Streams | ✓ Full | ✓ Partial |
| RDS (PG + MySQL + MariaDB + IAM auth) | ✓ Real Docker engines | ✗ Not available |
| ElastiCache (Redis/Valkey + IAM auth) | ✓ Real Docker engine | ✗ Not available |
| MSK (Kafka via Redpanda) | ✓ Real Kafka | ✗ Not available |
| Athena (real SQL via DuckDB sidecar) | ✓ Real queries | ✗ Not available |
| Glue Data Catalog | ✓ Full | ✗ Not available |
| Data Firehose (NDJSON delivery) | ✓ Full | ✗ Not available |
| Networking & Security | ||
| API Gateway v2 / HTTP API | ✓ Full | ✗ Not available |
| ELB v2 (ALB / NLB) | ✓ Full | ✗ Not available |
| IAM (users, roles, policies, groups) | ✓ 68+ ops | ⚠ Partial |
| STS (all 7 operations) | ✓ 7/7 ops | ⚠ 4/7 ops |
| Cognito (user pools, JWKS, SRP auth) | ✓ Full | ✗ Not available |
| KMS (sign, verify, re-encrypt) | ✓ Full | ⚠ Partial |
| SDK & IaC Compatibility | ||
| Java SDK v2 | ✓ 889/889 | ⚠ Partial |
| Node.js SDK v3 | ✓ 360/360 | ⚠ Partial |
| Python boto3 | ✓ 264/264 | ⚠ Partial |
| Go SDK v2 | ✓ 136/136 | ⚠ Partial |
| AWS CLI v2 | ✓ 145/145 | ⚠ Partial |
| Rust SDK | ✓ 86/86 | ⚠ Partial |
| Terraform / OpenTofu | ✓ 28/28 | ⚠ Partial |
| AWS CDK v2 | ✓ 17/17 | ⚠ Partial |
Real numbers from a 1,925-test AWS SDK compatibility suite. Floci Native vs LocalStack Community 4.14.0.