head to head · open source
valkey vs ioredis
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ioredis has 15,355 stars, 1,271 forks, 202 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 80% (27,603 vs 15,355 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; ioredis is written in TypeScript under MIT. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, ioredis 8%. 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 | ioredis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 15K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 ioredis if
- You want the ioredis feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and ioredis 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 ioredis
A robust, performance focused and full featured Redis client for Node.js. Supports Redis = 2.6.12. Completely compatible with Redis 7.x. ioredis is a stable project and maintenance is done on a best effort basis for relevant issues (contributions to ioredis will still be evaluated, reviewed, and merged when they benefit the project). For new projects, node redis is the recommended client library. node redis is the open source (MIT license) Redis JavaScript client library redesigned from the ground up and actively maintained. node redis supports new (hash field expiration) and future commands and the capabilities…
read the full ioredis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or ioredis more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and ioredis has 15,355. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and ioredis free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and ioredis under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and ioredis?
valkey is written in C and ioredis in TypeScript. 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 ioredis?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose ioredis if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.