head to head · open source
valkey vs libhv
valkey has 27,613 GitHub stars, 1,516 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. libhv has 7,572 stars, 1,371 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 265% (27,613 vs 7,572 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; libhv is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. valkey has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, libhv 18%. 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 | libhv | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | C | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 libhv if
- You want the libhv feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and libhv 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 libhv
English 中文 libhv Like libevent, libev, and libuv , libhv provides event loop with non blocking IO and timer, but simpler api and richer protocols. ✨ Features Cross platform (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, BSD, Solaris) High performance EventLoop (IO, timer, idle, custom, signal) TCP/UDP client/server/proxy TCP supports heartbeat, reconnect, upstream, MultiThread safe write and close, etc. Built in common unpacking modes (FixedLength, Delimiter, LengthField) RUDP support: WITH KCP SSL/TLS support: (via WITH OPENSSL or WITH GNUTLS or WITH MBEDTLS) HTTP client/server (support https http1/x http2 grpc) HTTP…
read the full libhv overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or libhv more popular?
valkey has 27,613 GitHub stars and libhv has 7,572. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and libhv free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and libhv under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and libhv?
valkey is written in C and libhv in C. 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 libhv?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,613 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose libhv if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.