# Redis 174 Hacker News commenters recommended Redis and 102 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (7 owners). **Verdict:** A fast, simple, battle-tested in-memory store with rich data structures, popular for caching and cross-node coordination; critics call it overused and warn about durability and licensing changes. ## Why people recommend it - Very fast in-memory performance (6 comments): "Key-value operations are mostly O(1). You'll never get that kind of performance with other databases because they intentionally don't give you that granularity." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654432)) "The point of Redis is that it is in memory and you can smash it with hot path queries while taking a lot of load off the backing DB." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906172)) "It's a 10 lines Python script that will deliver 20k/50k queries per second more or less, out of the box with zero optimizations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285689)) - Rich, battle-tested data structures (5 comments): "Redis gives you a very well-defined/understood set of rich data structures with built-in behavior like TTL, atomic operations, eviction, and persistence." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48412062)) "if Redis was embeddable you'd get a robust C-FFI style implementation of those data structures which has been tested a lot more" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415724)) "Redis uses a skiplist for range queries and ordered iteration paired with a hash table for O(1) lookups" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823009)) - Easy to set up and run (4 comments): "Redis is brought into a stack because (most importantly!) it's fast and (almost as importantly!) because it's simple." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639504)) "Throwing a hosted Redis in front of some hot-path API calls is very straightforward and easier to reason about" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666757)) "Redis/Valkey is relatively easy to stand up... I almost don't give it a second thought to stand up Redis" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124691)) - Shared coordination across many nodes (3 comments): "The entire value of redis IMO is that is ISN'T inside your normal application, but rather some shared storage that all nodes can use to coordinate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416079)) "redis gives you more goodies. You can store temporary state for tasks that require coordination between multiple nodes without race conditions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799532)) "having Redis able to handle scale independently of postgres has been a life saver, and saved us a lot of money" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47179161)) ## What people warn about - Overused, adds needless complexity (4 comments): "The idea of a separate networked process to store and retrieve variables from memory sounds like something a first year engineer would do" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895034)) "seeing startups spin up managed postgres + redis clusters + prisma on day 1 just to collect waitlist emails is peak feature vomit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778257)) "The amount of redis-as-database, or X really, that I see deployed that practically make no sense is insane." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667201)) - Can lose data, weak consistency (3 comments): "It should not land in broken states so easily. It should not limit the number of writers. It should not error during failover." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413600)) "most competent programmers decided that redis was just a smarter memcache and started designing around data loss" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986243)) "The docs explicitly state that clusters do not provide strong consistency and can lose acknowledged data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201419)) - Source-available license change backlash (3 comments): "They cared more about making money and open source was a useful facade to get people to contribute for free." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094391)) "all these hipsters startups (MongoDB, Redis, etc) all ended up enshittifying their open source products" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582710)) "That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290476)) - Narrow workloads, no indexes (2 comments): "Redis does not support indexes and all sorts of other things. It works well only for a specific kind of workload" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447217)) "Redis works great as a cache, but there are a few things you need to do in order to use it reliably as a cache." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639398)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Valkey](https://hackerapproved.com/p/valkey.md): 31 recommend - [Memcached](https://hackerapproved.com/p/memcached.md): 27 recommend - [Lux Redis-compatible server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lux.md): 8 recommend - [KiviDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kividb.md): 7 recommend - [DragonflyDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dragonfly.md): 5 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Redis", https://hackerapproved.com/p/redis/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).