head to head · open source
valkey vs predis
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. predis has 7,780 stars, 997 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 255% (27,603 vs 7,780 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; predis is written in PHP under MIT. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, predis 13%. 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 | predis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 7.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 997 |
| 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 predis if
- You want the predis feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and predis 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 predis
Predis [![Software license][ico license]](LICENSE) [![Latest stable][ico version stable]][link releases] [![Latest development][ico version dev]][link releases] [![Monthly installs][ico downloads monthly]][link downloads] [![Build status][ico build]][link actions] [![Coverage Status][ico coverage]][link coverage] A flexible and feature complete Redis / Valkey client for PHP 7.2 and newer. More details about this project can be found on the frequently asked questions. Main features Support for Redis from 3.0 to 8.0 . Support for clustering using client side sharding and pluggable keyspace distributors. Support…
read the full predis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or predis more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and predis has 7,780. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and predis free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and predis under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and predis?
valkey is written in C and predis in PHP. 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 predis?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose predis if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.