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Comparison · Infra & APIs

Dragonfly vs Jackett

A side-by-side editorial comparison of Dragonfly and Jackett — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.

Dragonfly vs Jackett: at a glance

FeatureDragonflyJackett
SectorInfra & APIsInfra & APIs
Velocity score5.05.0
Sparks · 30d00
Top themesin-memory-datastore, redis-compatible, upstream-sync, io-looptorznab, indexer-definitions, scraper-maintenance, self-hosted
Last editorial update3h ago1h ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

What is Dragonfly?

Dragonfly is paying down its Redis fork debt and chasing correctness in the new IO loop.

Releases land every few days as incremental i1.39.x tags, and the work splits three ways. First, resyncing forked Redis code with upstream Valkey — the hyperloglog resync pulled in a CVE fix for run-length overflow in sparse opcodes plus AVX2 and ARM NEON merge kernels, and exposed three Dragonfly-local bugs in the process. Second, correctness in the v1 and v2 IO loops: a pub/sub ordering defect where anti-starvation quota logic could run a pipelined UNSUBSCRIBE ahead of queued messages and silently drop them. Third, ongoing internal migration of command handlers to a new argument parser.

Read the full Dragonfly trajectory →

What is Jackett?

A daily-shipping indexer proxy whose entire product is a scraper definition file that never stops rotting.

Jackett ships a tagged release essentially every day, and every one of them is the same shape: tracker selectors updated, domains bumped, categories added, dead sites removed. The release notes are auto-generated commit lists with no prose. The C# application itself is stable; what changes is the YAML definition corpus that keeps a few hundred torrent trackers reachable through a single Torznab endpoint.

Read the full Jackett trajectory →

Dragonfly vs Jackett: editorial side-by-side

D
Dragonfly
INFRA · APIS
5.0

Dragonfly is paying down its Redis fork debt and chasing correctness in the new IO loop.

◆ Current state

Releases land every few days as incremental i1.39.x tags, and the work splits three ways. First, resyncing forked Redis code with upstream Valkey — the hyperloglog resync pulled in a CVE fix for run-length overflow in sparse opcodes plus AVX2 and ARM NEON merge kernels, and exposed three Dragonfly-local bugs in the process. Second, correctness in the v1 and v2 IO loops: a pub/sub ordering defect where anti-starvation quota logic could run a pipelined UNSUBSCRIBE ahead of queued messages and silently drop them. Third, ongoing internal migration of command handlers to a new argument parser.

◆ Where it's heading

The fork-maintenance thread is the structural one — Dragonfly carries Valkey-derived code that drifts, and resyncing is how it inherits both security fixes and SIMD performance work it did not write. Running two IO loop generations at once is the current source of risk, visible in tests that had to be skipped on the v1 leg and in an ordering bug that only appeared after v1.38 changed the dispatch quota. Neither thread is adding user-facing capability; this is a window of consolidation.

◆ Prediction

Expect the v2 IO loop to move toward default as the ordering and pause-semantics gaps close, and further upstream resyncs of forked Redis files now that the hyperloglog sync established a formatting convention to keep them cheap.

J
Jackett
INFRA · APIS
5.0

A daily-shipping indexer proxy whose entire product is a scraper definition file that never stops rotting.

◆ Current state

Jackett ships a tagged release essentially every day, and every one of them is the same shape: tracker selectors updated, domains bumped, categories added, dead sites removed. The release notes are auto-generated commit lists with no prose. The C# application itself is stable; what changes is the YAML definition corpus that keeps a few hundred torrent trackers reachable through a single Torznab endpoint.

◆ Where it's heading

This is maintenance-as-product, and the cadence is a symptom rather than a sign of momentum: trackers move domains, add anti-bot checks, and change markup, so the definitions decay continuously and the fix rate has to match. The visible trend across these releases is attrition — torr9, rockbox, rain, runtheframes, torrentleech-pl and elitetorrent-wf all removed in a single fortnight — partially offset by category expansion on the trackers that survive.

◆ Prediction

Expect the daily definition-churn cadence to continue unchanged, with the removal list growing faster than the addition list. Nothing in these entries indicates work on the application core.

Alternatives to Dragonfly and Jackett

Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Dragonfly or Jackett.

See all Dragonfly alternatives → · See all Jackett alternatives →

Recent activity from Dragonfly and Jackett

Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.

  1. 8h agoJackettDefinition updates: magnetcat selectors, torrentavenue renamed
  2. 1d agoJackettDefinition updates: hdgalaktik and tmghub selectors, freeleech handling
  3. 2d agoJackettpornotorrent moves to native Torznab API, nethd adds TV support
  4. 3d agoJacketttorr9 removed, engine tags and domains refreshed
  5. 4d agoJackettThree trackers removed, btschool gains sort settings
  6. 5d agoDragonflyi1.39.11: chore(hll): sync hyperloglog.c with valkey upstream (#7961)
  7. 5d agoJackettrockbox removed, TPB top100 selection becomes configurable
  8. 11d agoDragonflyFix mutable cross-thread access on shared reply builder
  9. 13d agoDragonflyi1.39.9: fix(facade): preserve pub/sub order on unsubscribe (v1 IO loop) (#7909)
  10. 26d agoDragonflyi1.39.6: test: skip V2-only pause tests under V1 (#7822)
  11. 1mo agoDragonflyi1.39.4: Add list compression tuning flags (#7762)
  12. 1mo agoDragonflyi1.39.3: chore(server): migrate main_service handlers to CmdArgParser

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Dragonfly and Jackett?

They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Dragonfly and Jackett are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.

Is Dragonfly better than Jackett?

Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Dragonfly and Jackett are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.

What are the best alternatives to Dragonfly?

Top Dragonfly alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Dragonfly alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/dragonfly for the full list with editorial commentary on each.

What are the best alternatives to Jackett?

Top Jackett alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Jackett alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/jackett for the full list with editorial commentary on each.