Open-source Aerospike alternatives

Redis is an in-memory data store that developers use as a cache, a session store, a database and a message broker. Because data lives in memory it answers requests quickly, which makes it popular for real-time applications. The project describes itself as a cache, a data structure server, and a document and vector query engine.

Rather than just strings, it offers data structures such as lists, sets, hashes, sorted sets and JSON, with higher-level patterns built on them, such as counters, queues, leaderboards and rate limiters, plus transactions and scripting. For caching it offers multiple eviction policies along with expiry for keys and for individual hash fields. It also handles key-value, document and time series storage, vector search and messaging. Client libraries cover most languages, and redis-cli and Redis Insight provide command line and graphical access.

The source is on GitHub, written in C, and can be built from source with documented flags for allocators, TLS and more. The license is listed as 'Other' in repository metadata, so check the current terms. Redis can be run on your own servers or consumed as a cloud-hosted service from the vendor.

Dragonfly is an in-memory data store designed for modern application workloads and positioned as a replacement for Redis and Memcached. It implements the Redis and Memcached APIs, so existing applications and client libraries can point at it without code changes.

Unlike the single-threaded design of classic Redis, Dragonfly is multi-threaded and built around fibers, which lets one instance use many CPU cores. The project reports much higher throughput, better cache hit rates with lower tail latency and up to 80 percent fewer resources for a workload of the same size, with benchmarks against Redis on cloud instances in its documentation. Topics also link it to caching, key-value storage, message brokering and the Valkey and KeyDB ecosystems. Documentation covers a quick start, configuration, design decisions and building from source.

Dragonfly's license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so check the terms before using it in a commercial product. You can run it on your own servers or through Dragonfly Cloud, the company's hosted service, and a guide for AI agents is provided for tooling integration.

Valkey is a distributed key-value database optimized for caching and other realtime workloads. It was forked from the open-source Redis project just before Redis moved to source-available licenses, and it continues as a community-driven alternative under the permissive BSD-3-Clause license.

It acts as a data structure server that mainly handles key-value workloads, supporting many native data structures along with an extensible module system for adding new structures and access patterns. The code is written in C and can be compiled with a simple make command on Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD, on both big and little endian and 32 and 64-bit systems. Support for Solaris-derived systems is limited and not guaranteed. TLS needs OpenSSL development libraries and can be built in or as a module.

The README is a quick-start only, with fuller documentation on valkey.io. Valkey is self-run software and is compatible with the Redis ecosystem of clients, so teams use it as a replacement for Redis in caching, session storage and queues when they prefer a fully open-source license.

ScyllaDB is a NoSQL database that implements the Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB APIs, so existing applications and drivers for those systems can talk to it. It is written in C++ on the Seastar framework and is aimed at real-time big data workloads that need high throughput and predictable latency.

The project describes a shared-nothing approach in which each CPU core manages its own slice of data, which it says increases throughput and storage capacity per machine and cuts hardware costs. Building the database is demanding: it needs a very recent C++23 compiler and many up-to-date libraries, so the project offers a frozen toolchain as a pre-configured Docker image that includes everything required. You then only need Docker or Podman to compile it.

The repository's license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so confirm the current terms before using it commercially. You can run ScyllaDB on your own servers or consume it as a managed cloud service from the company. It suits teams that have outgrown Cassandra's resource footprint or want a DynamoDB-compatible database they can run themselves.

Apache Cassandra is an open-source, transactional, distributed NoSQL database. It is built to manage very large amounts of data across many machines, aiming for linear scalability and proven fault tolerance whether it runs on commodity servers or in the cloud, with no loss of performance. It is written in Java and developed under the Apache Software Foundation.

The project site presents Cassandra 5.0 along with documentation, a quickstart and community resources, and recent talks from the community cover topics such as Storage Attached Indexes, the Accord transaction protocol, mutation tracking, backups with Medusa, a sidecar process and analytics integrations. Cassandra is queried through CQL and can be run in clusters spanning racks, data centers or cloud regions.

Cassandra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and you run it yourself, either on your own servers or on cloud virtual machines or Kubernetes. It is typically chosen for write-heavy, always-on applications such as time-series data, messaging, IoT and large user-facing systems that must stay available when individual nodes fail.

Apache Ignite is a clustered database aimed at high-performance computing, running at the speed of memory. It can act as a data grid, cache and SQL database across a cluster, which suits workloads that need low-latency access to large datasets. This repository contains Ignite 2, while Ignite 3 lives in a separate repository, and both are actively developed.

Its multi-tier storage design treats RAM, disks and Intel Optane as separate layers that can all hold live data. The memory tier holds data in DRAM or Optane in memory mode, and the disk tier is optional, offering persistence either in an external database or in Ignite's own storage. Client APIs are available for Java, .NET and C++, and repository topics mention distributed SQL, in-memory computing, Hadoop and IoT.

Ignite is an Apache Software Foundation project under Apache-2.0 and written in Java. You deploy it on your own servers or Kubernetes clusters. It suits teams building data-intensive services that need fast reads and writes, transactions and SQL together.