LocalStack Homepage

LocalStack

Open Source Cloud Service Emulator

Switzerland
Category
FaaS DBaaS Emulator
Pricing Model
Open Source Free Trial Free Tier

Overview

LocalStack Homepage
LocalStack Homepage
Category
FaaS DBaaS Emulator
Pricing Model
Open Source Free Trial Free Tier

What is LocalStack?

LocalStack is a cloud service emulator that operates within a single container on your computer or in your CI environment. With LocalStack, you can run your AWS applications, Lambda functions, Terraform configurations, and CDK stacks entirely on your local machine without needing to connect to a remote cloud provider. Whether you’re testing complex cloud-native applications or just exploring AWS services, LocalStack can accelerate and simplify your development workflow.

LocalStack supports a growing array of AWS services, including AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, ECS, and more. Paid plans include additional APIs, integrations, state persistence, IAM testing, and enhanced developer tooling. You can view a comprehensive list of supported APIs on their Feature Coverage page.

LocalStack offers extra integrations and features to facilitate local cloud development, which you can find in the user guides.

LocalStack is also evolving toward broader multi-cloud emulation capabilities beyond AWS.

Local Serverless Development with LocalStack and Terraform

Local Serverless Development with LocalStack and Terraform

Emulate AWS environments locally and deploy your applications globally

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Features

Category

FaaS
DBaaS
Emulator

Container Deployment

Docker
Docker Private Registry
Kubernetes

Supported Runtimes

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby

Pricing

Plans

LocalStack offers a free Community tier and paid Pro plans for advanced AWS emulation, integrations, cloud pods, CI usage, and enterprise features.

Community

$ 0 Free open source tier forever

  • Core AWS service emulation
  • Local development support
  • Single container deployment
  • MIT/Apache open source components

Base

$ $45 Per license per month billed monthly monthly

  • 85+ emulated services
  • CI integration support
  • Cloud Pods
  • Local state persistence
  • Application previews

Ultimate

$ $89 Per license per month billed annually annual

  • 110+ emulated services
  • Advanced IAM policy testing
  • Live AWS resource replication
  • Priority support
  • Advanced developer tooling

Enterprise

$ Custom Custom enterprise pricing custom

  • Enterprise-scale deployments
  • Custom workspace configurations
  • Offline / air-gapped deployments
  • Enterprise compliance features
  • Dedicated support
Find the full pricing details on the official LocalStack

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Advanced Techniques for Optimizing Kubernetes Spend with Convox

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Last updated: May 21, 2026

*Information is subject to change. Please consult the official LocalStack website for more details.

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Best LocalStack Alternatives

Alternatives to LocalStack by matching platform type, use cases, supported runtimes and deployment options.
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Frequently Asked Questions about LocalStack

For AWS emulation and local cloud development, the main LocalStack alternatives are AWS SAM, which provides native AWS serverless templates and local testing, and sandbox environments like Docker Compose with actual AWS SDK mocks. For full-service emulation on a budget, the most direct alternatives are running LocalStack’s Community Edition yourself or upgrading to the Pro plan for persistent state and CI support.

Yes. LocalStack runs a full AWS emulator inside a single container on your machine. You can develop and test AWS Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, S3 buckets, SQS queues, SNS topics, and many more AWS services without touching the real AWS cloud. It is the most popular way to run AWS Lambda locally and works with Terraform, CDK, Serverless Framework, and the AWS CLI.

LocalStack supports 110+ AWS services. The free Community Edition covers core services: Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, ECS, SSM, Secrets Manager, and IAM. The Base and Ultimate plans add 85 and 110+ services respectively, including CloudFront, API Gateway, Step Functions, EKS, RDS, and more. See the feature coverage page for the full list.

Yes. This is one of LocalStack’s most popular use cases. You can point Terraform, AWS CDK, Pulumi, Serverless Framework, and SAM to a local LocalStack endpoint and run your full infrastructure provisioning workflow without touching real AWS. It is the same approach as using LocalStack with Terraform for fast, zero-cost infrastructure testing.

Yes. LocalStack integrates with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins, and other CI platforms. The Pro plan includes dedicated CI support with pre-built Docker images and parallel test execution. You can run your full integration test suite against LocalStack instead of real AWS, which is faster and cheaper.

LocalStack gives you a local AWS emulator that is fast and free for development. Real AWS is the production truth. Use LocalStack for unit tests, integration tests, and local development to avoid AWS costs and latency. Keep staging and production on real AWS. The same Terraform or CDK code works in both environments.

The free Community Edition resets state when the container restarts. The Base plan ($45/month) adds persistent state via Cloud Pods, letting you save and restore your local AWS state. This is useful for test fixtures, shared team environments, and reproducing bugs.

LocalStack is language-agnostic since it emulates AWS APIs at the HTTP level. You can use any AWS SDK language: Python (boto3), JavaScript, Go, Java, PHP, Node.js, C#, Ruby, C++, and more. Your existing AWS code works against LocalStack without modifications. The same applies to infrastructure tools: Terraform, CDK, Pulumi, Serverless Framework, SAM, and AWS CLI all work out of the box.