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Redis

The real-time data platform

Overview

What Redis does

Redis is an open source, in-memory data store used as a database, cache, streaming engine, and message broker. It supports various data structures and offers high performance, replication, and a unique set of features.

What people use it for

  • Caching
  • Session management
  • Real-time analytics
  • Message queuing
  • Leaderboards

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 Redis.

  • Licensing changed from BSD to AGPL in 2025, impacting open-source usage
  • All data must fit in memory, limiting scalability to available RAM
  • No built-in support for multi-tenancy
  • Limited transaction support compared to traditional databases

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Redis

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.

  • Redis logo
    Redis
    vs
    SingleStore logo
    SingleStore

    SingleStore: Distributed in-memory database platform providing high-speed data processing and real-time analytics similar to Redis.

Capabilities

Features

  • In-memory data store

    In-memory data store capability

  • Data structures

    Data structures capability

  • Pub/Sub messaging

    Pub/Sub messaging capability

  • Lua scripting

    Lua scripting capability

  • Transactions

    Transactions capability

  • Persistence options

    Persistence options capability

  • Replication

    Replication capability

  • Clustering

    Clustering capability

  • Python

    Integration with Python

  • Node.js

    Integration with Node.js

  • Java

    Integration with Java

  • Go

    Integration with Go

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.

Is Redis open source?

Redis was open source under the BSD license since its inception in 2009 and has remained open source. However, in 2024-2025, Redis Labs changed licensing to source-available and AGPL, prompting the creation of Valkey, a BSD-licensed open-source fork.

Source
What is Redis used for?

Redis is an in-memory data structure store used primarily as a cache, database, and message broker. It provides high-speed data access for real-time applications, sessions, leaderboards, real-time analytics, and other use cases requiring fast data retrieval.

Source

Behind it

Who makes Redis

Company
Redis Ltd
Based in
Mountain View, CA
Founders
Salvatore Sanfilippo

Timeline

Redis over time

  1. Milestone2015-07-15

    Salvatore Sanfilippo joins Redis Labs as official sponsor of Redis project

    Source
  2. Founded2009-06-19

    Redis deployed to production by Salvatore Sanfilippo for LLOOGG web analytics

    Source

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Redis, 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.

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