Garnet

Microsoft's answer to Redis, and the benchmarks are eye-opening. Garnet delivers 10x higher throughput than Dragonfly on GET commands and massively outscales Redis on multi-threaded workloads. It speaks RESP protocol, so your existing Redis clients work without changes.

Redis is the default cache everyone knows. Dragonfly is the multi-threaded Redis alternative. KeyDB is Snapchat's multi-threaded fork. Valkey is the Linux Foundation's post-license-change Redis fork.

Built on .NET and Tsavorite (Microsoft Research's concurrent key-value store), Garnet is cross-platform and handles both cache and storage workloads. It supports cluster mode with sharding and replication out of the box.

The catch: Garnet is young — launched in 2024, and the production track record is thin compared to Redis's 15+ years. The .NET runtime is unusual for infrastructure software, which may complicate your ops team's tooling. Community adoption is still early, so expect fewer tutorials, fewer integrations, and more undiscovered edge cases. Benchmarks are impressive but synthetic — real-world performance depends on your access patterns.