Developers who want the most feature-rich, high-performance version of Redis should clearly choose Redis over a fork. If you have the time and inclination to engage in ideological debates about open source licensing, you may have other choices. But if you just want a great database that gets the job done and is historically primarily a cache but offers much more functionality today, you’ll probably choose Redis over its fork, Valkey.
Redis CEO Rowan Trollope claimed in an interview: “There is no doubt that Redis is a much more capable platform since we released Redis 8.0 with all the features of the Redis Stack,” he says. He substantiates this claim by at least classifying “everything” that Valkey doesn’t offer, including vector search, real-time indexing and querying engine, probabilistic data types, and JSON support, to name a few. Some vendors, such as Google Cloud, are starting to fill some of these gaps, at least in pre-GA releases such as Google’s Memorystore.)
That’s all the CEO says, right? What would a serious techie say about Redis? It might be hard to find a more trusted Redis expert than Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo, who recently returned to the Redis community (and company) after leaving in 2020. Why should I return? Above all, Sanfilippo wants to help shape Redis for a world overflowing with generative AI. In his words, “Recently I started thinking that sorted sets could inspire new data types where the scores are actually vectors.” “Redis has a real opportunity to emerge as a core part of the genAI infrastructure stack,” says Trollope. Trollope says that while discussions about licensing can be fun “popcorn fodder” that clings to the past, the real focus should be on the future of Redis as an essential part of the AI stack.
