head to head · open source
mall vs valkey
mall has 84,799 GitHub stars, 29,830 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. valkey has 27,258 stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. mall leads on adoption by 211% (84,799 vs 27,258 stars). mall is written in Java under Apache-2.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. mall has attracted 35% as many forks as stars, valkey 5%. 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
| mall | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 85K | ★ 27K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Java | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 30K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick mall if
- You weight community size — 85K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick valkey if
- You want the valkey 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 valkey fits your workflow better
About mall
mall is a complete e commerce system built on Spring Boot and MyBatis, distributed as a Java project under the Apache 2.0 license. It ships two applications in one repository: a storefront system for shoppers and an administrative back office for operators. The storefront covers the home portal, product recommendation, product search, product display, shopping cart, order flow, member center, customer service, and help center. The back office covers product management, order management, member management, promotion management, operations management, content management, statistics reports, finance management, perm…
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is mall or valkey more popular?
mall has 84,799 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,258. mall has the larger community by that measure.
Are mall and valkey free?
Both are open source. mall is licensed under Apache-2.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between mall and valkey?
mall is written in Java and valkey 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, mall or valkey?
Choose mall if you want the larger community (84,799 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose valkey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.