head to head · open source
drawDB vs valkey
drawDB has 40,237 GitHub stars, 3,352 forks, 241 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. valkey has 27,603 stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. drawDB leads on adoption by 46% (40,237 vs 27,603 stars). drawDB is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. drawDB has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, valkey 6%. valkey was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (database), 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.
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Side by side
| drawDB | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 28K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | JavaScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-01 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick drawDB if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- 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 drawDB
drawDB Free, simple, and intuitive database schema editor and SQL generator. DrawDB is a robust and user friendly database entity relationship diagram (ERD) editor right in your browser. Build diagrams with a few clicks, export and import SQL scripts, generate migrations, customize your editor, and more without creating an account. See the full set of features on here. Getting Started Local Development Build Docker Build If you want to enable sharing, set up the server and environment variables according to .env.sample . This is optional unless you need to share files. Contributing Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for…
read the full drawDB 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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is drawDB or valkey more popular?
drawDB has 40,237 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,603. drawDB has the larger community by that measure.
Are drawDB and valkey free?
Both are open source. drawDB is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between drawDB and valkey?
drawDB is written in JavaScript 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, drawDB or valkey?
Choose drawDB if you want the larger community (40,237 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose valkey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.