head to head · open source
valkey vs ioredis
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. ioredis has 15,341 stars, 1,254 forks, 202 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 78% (27,258 vs 15,341 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; ioredis is written in TypeScript under MIT. valkey has attracted 5% 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 | ★ 27K | ★ 15K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 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
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 ioredis
ioredis is a robust, performance focused and full featured Redis client for Node.js, written entirely in TypeScript and released under the MIT licence, intended for Node.js developers and platform teams that need their applications to talk to Redis reliably.
read the full ioredis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or ioredis more popular?
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars and ioredis has 15,341. 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 (27,258 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose ioredis if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.