Valkey

Valkey is Redis without the Redis drama. After Redis switched to a restrictive license, the Linux Foundation forked it and called it Valkey. Same code, same commands, same performance — but genuinely open source (BSD license). It's Redis 7.2 with a future that isn't controlled by one company.

If you're using Redis and worried about license compliance, Valkey is the drop-in replacement. Redis is still Redis — more features in the commercial version, but the license restricts competitive cloud services. Dragonfly is a Redis-compatible rewrite claiming 25x throughput. KeyDB was another fork but lost momentum. Memcached is simpler for pure caching.

Best for anyone running Redis who wants license certainty. The migration is literally swapping the binary — your data, configs, and clients all work unchanged.

The catch: Valkey forked at Redis 7.2, so newer Redis features won't appear. The ecosystem (Redis Modules, RedisJSON, RedisSearch) may not all work with Valkey. AWS and Google back it, which is reassuring but also means it serves their cloud interests. And if you don't care about licensing, Redis still works fine.