Instead of Redis: Valkey

Why Valkey is better

• Valkey keeps the BSD licence Redis had before 2024. Redis now ships under source-available licences or the AGPL, which matters if you embed or resell it.
• The Valkey project reports 2.1 million requests per second on a single server for Valkey 9.1, thanks to a redesigned I/O threading model.
• Valkey 9.0 added atomic slot migration and multiple databases in cluster mode, with clusters of up to 2,000 nodes.
• AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and others back the project, and hosted services such as Amazon ElastiCache run Valkey, so moving does not mean giving up a managed option.

When to keep Redis

Keep Redis if you use features from Redis 8 that Valkey does not have, such as the bundled query engine, JSON and vector types. Also keep it if you are on Redis Cloud or Redis Enterprise with a support contract. Since May 2025 Redis is available under the AGPL again, which settles the licence problem for many self-hosters.

Switching

For most apps this is a drop-in: Valkey forked from Redis 7.2.4 and speaks the same protocol, so existing clients connect unchanged. Swap the server binary or container image and keep your configuration and data files. On Amazon ElastiCache, switch the engine to Valkey.

Watch out

Valkey and Redis are drifting apart, so features added to Redis after the fork, and modules built for it, may not work on Valkey. Check any module you load. Valkey is governed by the Linux Foundation and funded by large vendors, which is stable but slower to add headline features than a single company.

Also worth a look

• Dragonfly A multi-threaded Redis-compatible store built for very large single nodes; pick it for heavy throughput and accept its source-available licence.