head to head · open source
valkey vs kombu
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. kombu has 3,141 stars, 1,044 forks, 217 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey leads on adoption by 768% (27,258 vs 3,141 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; kombu is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. valkey has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, kombu 33%. 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 | kombu | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | C | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 kombu if
- You want the kombu feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and kombu 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 kombu
Kombu is a BSD 3 Clause licensed Python messaging library that gives application authors an idiomatic, high level interface to the AMQP protocol and pluggable transports for Redis, Amazon SQS, MongoDB, PGMQ, ZooKeeper, SoftLayer MQ, and Pyro, aimed at Python developers and Celery based teams that need one consistent messaging API across several brokers.
read the full kombu overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or kombu more popular?
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars and kombu has 3,141. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and kombu free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and kombu under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and kombu?
valkey is written in C and kombu in Python. 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 kombu?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,258 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose kombu if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.