Compare Redis OSS and Valkey
Choosing between Redis OSS and Valkey
The most important difference is Valkey is fully open source (BSD licensing) and will always be open source as it's stewarded by the Linux Foundation. On the other hand, Redis OSS 7.2 is the last fully open source version of Redis. As of March 2025, Redis 8.0 is licensed under AGPLv3, which for many organizations is unviable due to its copyleft provision that requires any code changes to be contributed back to Redis. Many organizations strictly forbit the adoption of software licensed under AGPLv3 due to its legal and commercial risks.
If both BSD and AGPLv3 licensing are suitable options for your use case, the table below summarizes key differences in the features offered by Valkey and Redis OSS engines. While both engines are in-memory, key-value caches, they have significant differences beyond licensing.
If AGPLv3 licensing is too restrictive, you should look at Valkey which is the most permissive open source in-memory, key-value cache. Valkey is a fork of Redis OSS version 7.2 with exciting innovations such as I/O multithreading in Valkey 8.0, performance improvements in Valkey 8.1, bloom filters, and vector search.
Redis OSS vs. Valkey
Comparison by key feature
|
Feature
|
Redis OSS
|
Valkey
|
|---|---|---|
|
Sub-millisecond latency
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Developer ease of use
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Data partitioning
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Support for a broad set of programming languages
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Advanced data structures
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Multithreaded architecture
|
- |
Yes |
|
Snapshots
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Replication
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Transactions
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Pub/Sub
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Lua scripting
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Geospatial support
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Bloom filters
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Vector search
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
JSON support
|
Yes |
Yes |
How AWS can support your requirements
AWS offers Amazon ElastiCache, a serverless, fully managed caching service with full Redis OSS and Valkey compatibility. With ElastiCache, it is effortless to get started, operate, and scale caching workloads in the cloud. This is why hundreds of thousands of customers use ElastiCache to boost the performance of their databases and applications, achieve higher scale, and optimize their cost. With ElastiCache, you access the following capabilities while avoiding lock-in with open source software:
- Serverless lets you get started in under a minute and removes any need to plan, provision, and manage capacity.
- Fully managed removes undifferentiated caching management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, and failure recovery.
- Native integrations with other AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudTrail provides monitoring, observability, auditability, and governance over your caches.
- Excellence in the fundamentals of price performance, reliability, security, and operational excellence that are synonymous with AWS.