head to head · open source
valkey vs centrifugo
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. centrifugo has 10,946 stars, 752 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 152% (27,603 vs 10,946 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; centrifugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, centrifugo 7%. valkey was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (redis), 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
| valkey | centrifugo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 11K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 752 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick valkey if
- You weight community size — 28K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick centrifugo if
- You want the centrifugo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and centrifugo fits your workflow better
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 →
About centrifugo
Centrifugo Scalable real time messaging server in a language agnostic way. Centrifugo is an open source scalable real time messaging server. It instantly delivers messages to application online users connected over supported transports (WebSocket, HTTP streaming, Server Sent Events (aka EventSource), GRPC, WebTransport). Centrifugo has the concept of channel subscriptions – so it's a user facing PUB/SUB server. Centrifugo is language agnostic and can be used to build chat apps, live comments, multiplayer games, real time data visualizations, collaborative tools, AI streaming responses, etc. in combination with…
read the full centrifugo overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or centrifugo more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and centrifugo has 10,946. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and centrifugo free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and centrifugo under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and centrifugo?
valkey is written in C and centrifugo in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, valkey or centrifugo?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose centrifugo if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.