Redis vs. Valkey: The Fork That Matters in 2026
Compare Redis and Valkey — the community fork born from Redis' license change. Performance, compatibility, community support, and which to pick for your stack.
When Redis changed its license in 2024, the Linux Foundation forked it as Valkey. Two years later, both projects are thriving — but which should you deploy? better-openclaw supports both Redis and Valkey, letting you choose based on your priorities.
Redis: The Original
Redis remains the most widely used in-memory data store. It has decades of production battle-testing, extensive documentation, and a massive ecosystem of client libraries. Redis Ltd. continues active development with features like Redis Search, JSON support, and time-series data. The new license (SSPL/RSALv2) may matter if you're a cloud provider, but for self-hosting it's functionally identical.
Valkey: True Open Source
Valkey maintains full API compatibility with Redis while staying under the BSD-3 license. Backed by AWS, Google, Oracle, and the Linux Foundation, it's gaining rapid adoption. Performance is on par with Redis, and it's already the default in many Linux distributions. If open-source licensing matters to your organization, Valkey is the clear choice.
Practical Advice
For most self-hosted setups, the difference is negligible. Any Redis client library works with Valkey. If you need Redis-specific modules (RedisSearch, RedisJSON), stick with Redis. If you want a guaranteed open-source license, choose Valkey. better-openclaw provides both options, and switching between them requires zero configuration changes in dependent services.