head to head · open source
Qdrant vs valkey
Qdrant has 35,414 GitHub stars, 2,796 forks, 704 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey has 27,603 stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Qdrant leads on adoption by 28% (35,414 vs 27,603 stars). Qdrant is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. Qdrant 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.
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
| Qdrant | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 28K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Rust | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.8K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Qdrant if
- You weight community size — 35K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- 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 Qdrant
Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI applications Qdrant (read: quadrant ) is a vector similarity search engine and vector database. It provides a production ready service with a convenient API to store, search, and manage points—vectors with an additional payload. Qdrant is tailored for extended filtering support, making it useful for all sorts of neural network or semantic based matching, faceted search, and other applications. Qdrant is written in Rust 🦀, which makes it fast and reliable even under high load. See benchmarks. With Qdrant, embeddings or neural network encoders can be turned into…
read the full Qdrant 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 Qdrant or valkey more popular?
Qdrant has 35,414 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,603. Qdrant has the larger community by that measure.
Are Qdrant and valkey free?
Both are open source. Qdrant is licensed under Apache-2.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Qdrant and valkey?
Qdrant is written in Rust 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, Qdrant or valkey?
Choose Qdrant if you want the larger community (35,414 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose valkey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.