head to head · open source
TiDB vs valkey
TiDB has 40,553 GitHub stars, 6,243 forks, 6,976 open issues and last shipped today. valkey has 27,258 stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. TiDB leads on adoption by 49% (40,553 vs 27,258 stars). TiDB is written in Go under Apache-2.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. TiDB has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, valkey 5%. TiDB 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
| TiDB | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 27K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick TiDB if
- You weight community size — 41K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 TiDB
TiDB is an open source, cloud native, distributed SQL database written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0, aimed at teams that need ACID transactions, real time analytics, and vector search at scale without data silos.
About valkey
Valkey is high performance data structure server. Serves key/value workloads first. Supports wide range of native structures plus extensible plugin system for new data structures and access patterns. Written in C, licensed BSD 3 Clause. Lives in key value store and NoSQL ecosystem, shares protocol lineage with Redis, and carries cache , database , key value store , redis , valkey client topics.
read the full valkey overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is TiDB or valkey more popular?
TiDB has 40,553 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,258. TiDB has the larger community by that measure.
Are TiDB and valkey free?
Both are open source. TiDB is licensed under Apache-2.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between TiDB and valkey?
TiDB is written in Go 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, TiDB or valkey?
Choose TiDB if you want the larger community (40,553 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.