head to head · open source
valkey vs lettuce
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. lettuce has 5,778 stars, 1,102 forks, 204 open issues and last shipped today. valkey leads on adoption by 372% (27,258 vs 5,778 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; lettuce is written in Java under MIT. valkey has attracted 5% 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 | ★ 27K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 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
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 lettuce
Lettuce is an MIT licensed, thread safe Java Redis client from the Redis organization that speaks to Redis over synchronous, asynchronous, and reactive APIs, and it is aimed at Java teams running Redis or Redis compatible caches such as AWS ElastiCache and Azure Redis Cache.
read the full lettuce overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or lettuce more popular?
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars and lettuce has 5,778. 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 (27,258 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose lettuce if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.