head to head · open source
valkey vs miniredis
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. miniredis has 3,620 stars, 258 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey leads on adoption by 653% (27,258 vs 3,620 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; miniredis is written in Go under MIT. valkey has attracted 5% 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 | ★ 27K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 258 |
| 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 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
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 miniredis
miniredis is a pure Go in memory implementation of parts of the Redis server that speaks a real TCP interface inside a Go unittest process, built for Go developers who need to exercise Redis backed code without running an external Redis instance.
read the full miniredis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or miniredis more popular?
valkey has 27,258 GitHub stars and miniredis has 3,620. 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 (27,258 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose miniredis if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.