Floci is a free AWS local emulator that replaces the archived LocalStack

Floci is a free, open-source local emulator for AWS. The project describes itself as "the AWS Local Emulator alternative" and a drop-in replacement for LocalStack. The GitHub repository has 28,600 stars. It sits 15th on Trendshift's daily list today, which tracks which repositories developers are picking up right now.

The project was created on 18 February 2026. The latest release, 2.4.0, went out on 31 October. The maintainers are the floci-io organisation. The code is MIT-licensed, written in Java.

What it does

Floci gives local versions of AWS services on a developer's machine. A team points its AWS SDK, AWS CLI, Terraform, CDK or OpenTofu at http://localhost:4566 and keeps every existing workflow. Credentials can be any non-empty values. Standard SDK calls, CLI commands and infrastructure-as-code calls run against the local emulator without a cloud account.

The services the README lists cover the common core. S3, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS and Lambda are there. So are IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, EventBridge and Step Functions. API Gateway, Cognito, CloudWatch, Bedrock and SageMaker are all listed. RDS, Neptune, DocumentDB, ECS, EC2, EKS and MSK are there too. For the heavier ones, Floci runs real Docker containers instead of shallow mocks. That list includes Lambda, RDS, Neptune, ElastiCache, MSK, ECS, EC2, EKS, OpenSearch and CodeBuild.

Why it exists now

LocalStack's free community edition was archived on 23 March 2026. From that date, running the plain LocalStack image without an auth token stopped working. Security updates on the community image also stopped. A team that ran LocalStack in CI lost its free option. The project page says Floci exists as "the no-strings-attached alternative."

The README includes a direct comparison table. Floci says it does not require an auth token. It says LocalStack Community does. Floci says it still publishes security updates. It says LocalStack Community's are frozen. Floci claims a startup time of about 24 milliseconds against about 3.3 seconds. It claims idle memory of about 13 MiB against about 143 MiB. It claims a Docker image size of about 90 MB against about 1.0 GB. Every figure is Floci's own.

What a team should check

The migration path the README gives is short. Swap the image name in a Dockerfile or compose file from the LocalStack image to floci/floci:latest. Keep the same AWS environment variables. Keep every existing test. A team on LocalStack's community image can test Floci on one build before touching the main pipeline.

The one thing a swap cannot fix on its own is service-level coverage. LocalStack Community supported a wide set of AWS calls. Floci lists over 100 named services, but its coverage per service is its own. A team that depends on a specific EventBridge pattern or a Bedrock model should run its own suite first. The same goes for a non-standard API Gateway call. Floci's maintainers publish per-service notes in the Services Overview page the README links.

Where this fits the bigger picture

Floci is not the only replacement. LocalEmu, a fork of the archived LocalStack community code, also exists. Moto, the older Python mock library, is still active. The shape of the choice depends on how a team runs its tests. Floci is container-first. Moto runs inside a Python process. LocalEmu is closer to the old LocalStack behaviour.

The 28,600 stars say enough teams have made the move. That is why Floci shows up on Trendshift's daily list today. For a team still paying LocalStack a licence, Floci is a real alternative. The same goes for a team still running on the frozen community image.

Source

Floci on GitHub, including the project README and comparison table.