head to head · open source
Qdrant vs valkey
Qdrant has 34,694 GitHub stars, 2,685 forks, 704 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey has 27,258 stars, 1,318 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped today. Qdrant leads on adoption by 27% (34,694 vs 27,258 stars). Qdrant is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. Qdrant has attracted 8% 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.
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
| Qdrant | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 27K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Rust | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Qdrant if
- You weight community size — 35K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- 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 Qdrant
Qdrant is a vector similarity search engine and database built in Rust, designed for production use in AI applications. It stores, manages, and retrieves high dimensional vectors alongside associated metadata (payloads), supporting fast nearest neighbor search with filtering. It solves the problem of efficiently performing semantic or neural based matching at scale—such as finding similar images, recommending content, or powering retrieval augmented generation (RAG)—by replacing slow or inflexible brute force or index based approaches with a purpose built engine optimized for vector operations.…
read the full Qdrant overview →
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 Qdrant or valkey more popular?
Qdrant has 34,694 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,258. Qdrant has the larger community by that measure.
Are Qdrant and valkey free?
Both are open source. Qdrant is licensed under Apache-2.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Qdrant and valkey?
Qdrant is written in Rust 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, Qdrant or valkey?
Choose Qdrant if you want the larger community (34,694 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.