Dragonfly vs Redis
Redis: Traditional open-source in-memory datastore, significantly slower but more established ecosystem
Dragonfly
High-performance Redis-compatible in-memory datastore with 25x better throughput
As of 29 August 2026, Dragonfly is free to use. Dragonfly is a modern in-memory data store built on a thread-per-core architecture offering Redis API compatibility. Softwr lists it under Databases. Dragonfly is available on Web.
Overview
What Dragonfly does
Dragonfly is a high-performance in-memory datastore designed as a Redis and Memcached compatible alternative. Built on a novel thread-per-core architecture with new algorithms and data structures, Dragonfly achieves 25 times higher queries per second than Redis (3.97M QPS versus 718K) while using 30% less memory. The platform maintains full API compatibility with Redis and Memcached, allowing existing applications to migrate with minimal code changes. Dragonfly is optimized for low-latency caching, real-time feature serving for machine learning applications, concurrency-safe message queues with high throughput, and real-time leaderboards. The platform supports caching workloads up to 1TB with 1M peak throughput per instance. Dragonfly Cloud is a managed service offering serverless deployment with auto-scaling, while Community Edition is available as open source.
What people use it for
- High-throughput caching for web applications
- Real-time leaderboards and rankings
- Message queue and event processing
- ML model feature serving at millisecond latencies
- Gaming session state and player data storage
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Dragonfly.
- Flex tier starting at $36/month may be underpriced, requiring careful usage monitoring
- Business tier $2,000/month represents significant jump in cost
- Limited to in-memory storage, not suitable for cold data or archival
- Bring-your-own-cloud requirement on Business tier adds operational complexity
- Cloud availability dependent on AWS/GCP/Azure uptime
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Dragonfly
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
Dragonfly vs Memcached
Memcached: Lightweight in-memory cache, simpler but less feature-rich than Dragonfly
Dragonfly vs Valkey
Valkey: Redis fork offering similar compatibility but different architecture and governance
Pricing
What Dragonfly costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free Tier
Free
- 100 cloud credits for new signups
- Equivalent to free trial
Business
$2,000 /mo
- Starting price for enterprise offering
- Bring-your-own-cloud deployment
- Auto-scaling with custom SLAs
- SSO and MFA support
- Dedicated support
Enterprise
On request
- Custom pricing
- Any-cloud deployment
- Custom instances and sizing
- White-glove migration support
- Advanced security and compliance
- Premium support
Capabilities
Features
Redis API compatibility
Full API compatibility for drop-in migration
Thread-per-core architecture
Novel multi-threaded design for massive throughput
High-performance caching
25x higher QPS than Redis with low latency
Memory efficiency
30% better memory efficiency than Redis
Real-time leaderboards
Sorted sets for gaming and ranking applications
Message queue support
Concurrency-safe queues with high throughput
ML feature serving
Low-latency feature store for real-time ML models
Cloud deployment
Managed Dragonfly Cloud with auto-scaling
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
How much faster is Dragonfly than Redis?
Dragonfly achieves 3.97M queries per second compared to Redis's 718K QPS, representing a 25x improvement. Memory efficiency is also 30% better.
SourceCan I migrate from Redis to Dragonfly without code changes?
Yes. Dragonfly maintains full API compatibility with Redis and Memcached, allowing drop-in replacement with minimal to no code modifications.
SourceKeep looking
Where to go from Dragonfly
- Dragonfly alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Dragonfly pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Dragonfly badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Databases softwareThe full category
- Best Databases softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Databases software for
Compare Dragonfly with
- Redis
- Valkey
- Memcached
- Readyset
- SingleStore
- Apache Druid
- TiDB
- ScyllaDB
- Firebolt
- QuestDB
- Amazon Aurora
- Couchbase
- Apache Hadoop
- Apache Spark
- ArangoDB
- Canary Labs
- Chroma
- Apache Solr
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Free plan10 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Dragonfly, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Dragonfly
Dragonfly alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Dragonfly pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Dragonfly
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Dragonfly badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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