Amazon DynamoDB vs Valkey
Amazon DynamoDB
aws.amazon.com
Valkey
valkey.ioSide by side
| Figure | Amazon DynamoDB | Valkey |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Key-Value Databases | 9.1 (#2) | 7.4 (#21) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.9 (#11) | 7.7 (#58) |
| Spec score · NoSQL Databases | 9.0 (#5) | 7.4 (#26) |
| Integrations | The feature page lists integrations with AWS services; it describes AWS KMS encryption, IAM access control, and VPC endpoints with AWS PrivateLink. | The Valkey site lists managed or compatible offerings from Amazon ElastiCache, Google Cloud Memorystore, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cache, UpCloud, DigitalOcean, and others. |
| Security | Customer data is encrypted in transit and at rest by default, and access can be controlled with IAM policies down to specific items and attributes. | Valkey recommends restricting network access to trusted clients and provides ACL-based authentication and optional TLS for client connections, replication links, and the cluster bus. |
| What it does | Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless, fully managed distributed NoSQL database supporting key-value and document models with single-digit-millisecond performance. | Valkey is an open source, high-performance key/value datastore for caching, message queues, and use as a primary database. |
Plans
Amazon DynamoDB
- Free tierFree
- On-demand capacityPrice not published
- Provisioned capacityPrice not published
- DynamoDB Free TierFree
In their own words
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless, managed NoSQL database for applications that need single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, according to AWS. Users do not provision or patch database servers, and tables can scale automatically, including to zero in on-demand mode. Primary keys and global or local secondary indexes provide ways to query data. Global tables support multi-Region, multi-active operation; AWS says they are designed for up to 99.999% availability. The database also supports native vector search for similarity searches and agent memory use cases. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest by default, and IAM policies can restrict access to specific items and attributes. Point-in-time recovery provides continuous, per-second backups and restoration within a configured period of 1 to 35 days. A free tier is listed with 25 WCUs, 25 RCUs, and 25 GB of storage per Region and payer account, among other limits. On-demand capacity is billed per request consumed; provisioned capacity is billed for specified capacity even if usage is lower.
Valkey
Valkey is a free, open-source key/value datastore for caching, message queues and primary database workloads. It handles strings, numbers, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and other data types. Deployments can run as a standalone daemon or as a cluster, with replication and high-availability options. Lua scripting and module plugins can add commands and data types. Documented uses include caching database or API results, session tokens, rendered HTML, reports, leaderboards, matchmaking and AI or ML inference outputs. Installation is available from source, Docker, Homebrew or MacPorts on macOS, and package managers for Linux and BSD. Valkey runs on Linux and macOS and can be self-hosted or accessed through an API; Windows is not officially supported, though WSL installation is described for development. The Linux Foundation backs the project, which says it will remain open source. Security guidance covers ACL authentication, optional TLS and network restrictions. Protocols include RESP, TCP and Unix sockets.