head to head · open source
valkey vs redigo
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. redigo has 9,846 stars, 1,230 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 1.0 years ago. valkey leads on adoption by 180% (27,603 vs 9,846 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; redigo is written in Go under Apache-2.0. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, redigo 12%. 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 | redigo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 9.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2025-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 redigo if
- You want the redigo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and redigo 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 redigo
Redigo ====== Redigo is a Go client for the Redis / Valkey database. Features A Print like API with support for all Redis commands. Pipelining, including pipelined transactions. Publish/Subscribe. Connection pooling. Script helper type with optimistic use of EVALSHA. Helper functions for working with command replies. Documentation API Reference FAQ Examples Installation Install Redigo using the "go get" command: go get github.com/gomodule/redigo/redis The Go distribution is Redigo's only dependency. Related Projects rafaeljusto/redigomock A mock library for Redigo. chasex/redis go cluster A Redis cluster client…
read the full redigo overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or redigo more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and redigo has 9,846. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and redigo free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and redigo under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and redigo?
valkey is written in C and redigo 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 redigo?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose redigo if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.