Upstash Redis vs Valkey
Upstash Redis
upstash.com
Valkey
valkey.ioSide by side
| Figure | Upstash Redis | Valkey |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.20/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 11 | 1 |
| Spec score · Key-Value Databases | 8.3 (#4) | 7.4 (#21) |
| Security | TLS is enabled by default for all Upstash Redis databases and cannot be disabled. | 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. |
| Support | Enterprise support includes response-time SLAs and priority access to Upstash's support team. | The Valkey site lists Percona as offering operational support and project-based consulting for Valkey databases. |
| Use cases | Documented uses include caching, sessions, rate limiting, queues, distributed locks, pub/sub, feature flags, leaderboards and recommendations. | The quick start guide describes caching database or API results, session tokens, rendered HTML, reports, leaderboards, matchmaking, and AI or ML inference outputs. |
| What it does | Upstash Redis is a fully managed, serverless Redis-compatible cloud database with pay-per-request and fixed-price options. | Valkey is an open source, high-performance key/value datastore for caching, message queues, and use as a primary database. |
Plans
Upstash Redis
- FreeFree
- Pay as You Go$0.20 a month
- Fixed 250MB$10 a month
- Fixed 1GB$20 a month
- Fixed 5GB$100 a month
- Fixed 10GB$200 a month
- Prod Pack add-on$200 a month
- Fixed 50GB$400 a month
- Fixed 100GB$800 a month
- Fixed 500GB$1,500 a month
In their own words
Upstash Redis
Upstash Redis is a fully managed, serverless Redis database in the cloud, with durable storage and pay-per-request pricing. It accepts connections over HTTP REST and the standard Redis TCP protocol. Databases can be replicated across regions for low-latency reads near users; the product describes multi-zone replication, automatic failover and persistence through restarts and failures. Listed use cases include caching, rate limiting, queues and streams, session storage, search and AI agent memory. It supports the Redis client protocol through version 8.4 and adds Search and Vector command families. Any Redis client can connect, including clients for TypeScript, Python, Go and Java. A Vercel integration can create or connect databases and expose environment variables to Vercel projects. TLS is enabled by default and cannot be turned off. The Free plan provides 256 MB of data, 10 GB of monthly bandwidth and 500K monthly commands. Pay as You Go is billed at $0.20 per 100K commands; storage and bandwidth charges may also apply. Its headquarters are in California.
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.