head to head · open source
Dragonfly vs valkey
Dragonfly has 31,844 GitHub stars, 1,295 forks, 308 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey has 27,583 stars, 1,540 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Dragonfly leads on adoption by 15% (31,844 vs 27,583 stars). Dragonfly is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. Dragonfly has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, valkey 6%. Dragonfly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (cache, database, key-value, nosql), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Dragonfly | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 28K |
| License | Custom / other | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | C++ | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Dragonfly if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick valkey if
- You want the valkey feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and valkey fits your workflow better
About Dragonfly
Before moving on, please consider giving us a GitHub star ⭐️. Thank you! Other languages: 简体中文 日本語 한국어 Português ภาษาไทย Website • Docs • Quick Start • Community Discord • Dragonfly User Conference • Join the Dragonfly Community GitHub Discussions • GitHub Issues • Contributing • AI Agents Guide • Dragonfly Cloud The world's most efficient in memory data store Dragonfly is an in memory data store built for modern application workloads. Fully compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs, Dragonfly requires no code changes to adopt. Compared to legacy in memory datastores, Dragonfly delivers 25X more throughput…
read the full Dragonfly overview →
About valkey
This project was forked from the open source Redis project right before the transition to their new source available licenses. This README is just a fast quick start document. More details can be found under valkey.io What is Valkey? Valkey is a high performance data structure server that primarily serves key/value workloads. It supports a wide range of native structures and an extensible plugin system for adding new data structures and access patterns. Building Valkey using Makefile Valkey can be compiled and used on Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD. We support big endian and little endian architectures…
read the full valkey overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Dragonfly or valkey more popular?
Dragonfly has 31,844 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,583. Dragonfly has the larger community by that measure.
Are Dragonfly and valkey free?
Both are open source. Dragonfly has no licence declared in this registry, and valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Dragonfly and valkey?
Dragonfly is written in C++ and valkey in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Dragonfly or valkey?
Choose Dragonfly if you want the larger community (31,844 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose valkey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.