head to head · open source
valkey vs miniredis
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. miniredis has 3,635 stars, 268 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 659% (27,603 vs 3,635 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; miniredis is written in Go under MIT. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, miniredis 7%. 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 | miniredis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 268 |
| 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 miniredis if
- You want the miniredis feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and miniredis 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 miniredis
Miniredis Pure Go Redis test server, used in Go unittests. Sometimes you want to test code which uses Redis, without making it a full blown integration test. Miniredis implements (parts of) the Redis server, to be used in unittests. It enables a simple, cheap, in memory, Redis replacement, with a real TCP interface. Think of it as the Redis version of net/http/httptest . It saves you from using mock code, and since the redis server lives in the test process you can query for values directly, without going through the server stack. There are no dependencies on external binaries, so you can easily integrate it in…
read the full miniredis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or miniredis more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and miniredis has 3,635. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and miniredis free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and miniredis under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and miniredis?
valkey is written in C and miniredis in Go. 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 miniredis?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose miniredis if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.