head to head · open source
valkey vs rueidis
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rueidis has 2,993 stars, 272 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. valkey leads on adoption by 822% (27,603 vs 2,993 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; rueidis is written in Go under Apache-2.0. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, rueidis 9%. valkey was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cache, 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 | rueidis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 272 |
| 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 rueidis if
- You want the rueidis 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 rueidis 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 rueidis
rueidis A fast Golang Redis client that does auto pipelining and supports server assisted client side caching. Features Auto pipelining for non blocking redis commands Server assisted client side caching Generic Object Mapping with client side caching Cache Aside pattern with client side caching Distributed Locks with client side caching Helpers for writing tests with rueidis mock OpenTelemetry integration Hooks and other integrations Go redis like API adapter by @418Coffee Pub/Sub, Sharded Pub/Sub, Streams Redis Cluster, Sentinel, RedisJSON, RedisBloom, RediSearch, RedisTimeseries, etc. Probabilistic Data…
read the full rueidis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or rueidis more popular?
valkey has 27,603 GitHub stars and rueidis has 2,993. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and rueidis free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and rueidis under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and rueidis?
valkey is written in C and rueidis 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 rueidis?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,603 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose rueidis if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.