IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › Valkey · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

Valkey

11Judge labels

1First choices

1Negative labels

4 of 12Models named it

1Category

September 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table vv2026-09.2, every buyer segment counted.

Standing

7 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. Valkey was named 7 times in NoSQL, where MongoDB led with 59%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business22 of 47

under the label threshold

Mid-market8 of 72

under the label threshold

Enterprise17 of 48

under the label threshold

In nosql · each standing computed within its segment · bars are 0 to 100 · the accent bar is the product's own best reading

Standing by category

Every category where a model named Valkey for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
NoSQL databases	Data platform	2%	8 of 72	14%	7	under 10 labels · led by MongoDB at 59%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Valkey yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Valkey across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	1	2	1	1	5
Perplexity Sonar	0	0	0	0	0
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	1	0	1
Mistral Small	0	0	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	0	0	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0	0	0
Kimi K2	0	0	0	0	0
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	0	0	0	0
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	0	0	0

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct1 labelNone

Paraphrase3 labels1

Comparative1 labelNone

Budget-constrained3 labelsNone

Scale-constrained1 labelNone

Negative2 labels1not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative11 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 2 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“If you need a ultra-fast, in-memory key-value store for caching, session management, or rate-limiting, Valkey is the premier choice.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · NoSQL · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“Extreme performance / caching | Valkey | Lightweight, fast, fully open-source community fork.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · NoSQL · budget prompt · alternative

“For new projects, you should use Valkey or Dragonfly to avoid vendor lock-in.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · NoSQL · negative prompt · alternative

“Valkey and KeyDB are fully free BSD-licensed drop-in replacements” DeepSeek V4 Flash · NoSQL · budget prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Redis / Valkey: Excellent as an in-memory database for high-performance caching... rarely used as the *primary* database” Gemini 3.5 Flash · NoSQL · direct prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Valkey, over the 11 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Valkey was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

MongoDB11 of 116Not in the top three

Amazon DynamoDB11 of 111Not in the top three

Redis10 of 110Not in the top three

Apache Cassandra7 of 110Not in the top three

Azure Cosmos DB6 of 110Not in the top three

ScyllaDB6 of 110Not in the top three

Neo4j5 of 110Not in the top three

Couchbase4 of 110Not in the top three

Google Cloud Firestore3 of 111Not in the top three

PostgreSQL3 of 111Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Valkey. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 3 of the 11 answers that named Valkey and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

sourceforge.net3

topbusinesssoftware.com3

freetier.co2

getapp.com2

guideflow.com2

odbms.org2

scylladb.com2

1bench.dev1

aerospike.com1

analyticsinsight.net1

Nineteen of the nineteen domain citations in answers naming Valkey came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

freetier.co/directory/categories/nosql-databases2

getapp.com/it-management-software/nosql-databases/p/open-source2

guideflow.com/blog/nosql-database-software2

odbms.org/2026/06/%F0%9F%97%84%EF%B8%8F-free-open-source-nosql-software2

sourceforge.net/software/nosql-database/for-startup2

sourceforge.net/software/nosql-database/free-version2

topbusinesssoftware.com/categories/nosql-database/free2

1bench.dev/databases/nosql1

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Valkey's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Valkey, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at valkey.io is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.