head to head · open source
valkey vs StackExchange.Redis
valkey has 27,583 GitHub stars, 1,540 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. StackExchange.Redis has 6,207 stars, 1,560 forks, 214 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey leads on adoption by 344% (27,583 vs 6,207 stars). valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause; StackExchange.Redis is written in C# under MIT. valkey has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, StackExchange.Redis 25%. 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 | StackExchange.Redis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 28K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 StackExchange.Redis if
- You want the StackExchange.Redis feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and StackExchange.Redis 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 StackExchange.Redis
StackExchange.Redis =================== StackExchange.Redis is a .NET client for communicating with RESP servers such as Redis, Azure Managed Redis, Garnet, Valkey, AWS ElastiCache, and a wide range of other Redis like servers. We do not maintain a list of compatible servers, but if the server has a Redis like API: it will probably work fine. If not: log an issue with details! For all documentation, see here. Build Status Package Status Release notes at: GitHub Releases (3.0 onwards; earlier releases)
read the full StackExchange.Redis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is valkey or StackExchange.Redis more popular?
valkey has 27,583 GitHub stars and StackExchange.Redis has 6,207. valkey has the larger community by that measure.
Are valkey and StackExchange.Redis free?
Both are open source. valkey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and StackExchange.Redis under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between valkey and StackExchange.Redis?
valkey is written in C and StackExchange.Redis 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, valkey or StackExchange.Redis?
Choose valkey if you want the larger community (27,583 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose StackExchange.Redis if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.