You can try evil-mode which is just the vi interface, Spacemacs is more of a packaged solution that happens to include the vi interface. Having used vi interfaces in other editors (VS, IntelliJ, Eclipse, NetBeans, Atom, Sublime, VSCode, etc.), based on my experiences, evil gives the most accurate vim experience.
The other editors don't have modes in the same way the emacs does though. What I find frustrating is if your in the package manager mode for example, then your keybindings break.
Spacemacs improves this for some modes, but it still won't allow custom bindings in any/most of them.
