head to head · open source
valkey vs go-redis
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. go-redis has 22,285 stars, 2,631 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 24% (27,603 vs 22,285 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; go-redis is written in Go under BSD-2-Clause. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, go-redis 12%. 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 | go-redis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 22K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 go-redis if
- You want the go-redis feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and go-redis 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 go-redis
Redis client for Go go redis is the official Redis client library for the Go programming language. It offers a straightforward interface for interacting with Redis servers. Supported versions In go redis we are aiming to support the last three releases of Redis. Currently, this means we do support: Redis 8.0 using Redis CE 8.0 Redis 8.2 using Redis CE 8.2 Redis 8.4 using Redis CE 8.4 Redis 8.8 using Redis CE 8.8 Redis 8.10 using Redis CE 8.10 Although the go.mod states it requires at minimum go 1.24 , our CI is configured to run the tests against all supported versions of Redis and multiple versions of Go (1.24…
read the full go-redis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or go-redis more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and go-redis has 22,285. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and go-redis free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and go-redis under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and go-redis?
valkey is written in C and go-redis 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 go-redis?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose go-redis if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.