head to head · open source
valkey vs go-redis
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. go-redis has 22,242 stars, 2,591 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 23% (27,258 vs 22,242 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; go-redis is written in Go under BSD-2-Clause. valkey has attracted 5% 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 | ★ 27K | ★ 22K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick valkey if
- You weight community size — 27K 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
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 →
About go-redis
go redis is the official Redis client library for the Go programming language, published as github.com/redis/go redis/v9 under the BSD 2 Clause licence, and it is aimed at Go developers whose applications need to talk to Redis servers.
read the full go-redis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or go-redis more popular?
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars and go-redis has 22,242. 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 (27,258 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.