// the take
Valkey is the Linux Foundation's fork of Redis, forked right before the license change, maintaining the BSD-licensed in-memory data structure server. It's for anyone running Redis-compatible caches/datastores who doesn't want to deal with the Redis Inc. licensing terms and wants to stay on an open-source trajectory.
Drop-in protocol and command compatibility with Redis means existing clients and tooling work unmodified. Backed by a real governance structure (LF Projects) and multiple corporate maintainers (AWS, Google, etc.) rather than a single vendor, so it's less likely to get relicensed out from under users again. Active development with both Makefile and CMake build systems, TLS, RDMA (experimental), module API support, and visible performance dashboards tracking regressions across versions.
It's a fork carrying the full weight of Redis's C codebase complexity, including vendored dependencies like jemalloc checked straight into the tree, which makes the repo huge and dependency updates a manual chore. Divergence from Redis is still new enough that documentation and third-party tooling assume Redis naming/behavior, so edge cases in compatibility can surprise you. RDMA support is explicitly experimental and Linux-only, and CMake build is still marked experimental too, so production setups should stick to the traditional Makefile path for now.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →