head to head · open source
valkey vs lettuce
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lettuce has 5,786 stars, 1,115 forks, 204 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey leads on adoption by 377% (27,603 vs 5,786 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; lettuce is written in Java under MIT. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, lettuce 19%. 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 | lettuce | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 lettuce if
- You want the lettuce feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and lettuce 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 lettuce
Lettuce Advanced Java Redis client =============================== Lettuce is a scalable thread safe Redis client for synchronous, asynchronous and reactive usage. Multiple threads may share one connection if they avoid blocking and transactional operations such as BLPOP and MULTI / EXEC . Lettuce is built with netty. Supports advanced Redis features such as Sentinel, Cluster, Pipelining, Auto Reconnect and Redis data models. This version of Lettuce has been tested against the latest Redis source build. synchronous, asynchronous and reactive usage Redis Sentinel Redis Cluster SSL and Unix Domain Socket…
read the full lettuce overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or lettuce more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and lettuce has 5,786. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and lettuce free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and lettuce under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and lettuce?
valkey is written in C and lettuce in Java. 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 lettuce?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose lettuce if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.