Redis licensing explained

Redis Ltd. announced the move away from BSD on 20 March 2024, starting with Redis 7.4. Eight days later, on 28 March 2024, the Linux Foundation announced Valkey, a BSD fork that continues from Redis 7.2.4. On 1 May 2025 Redis added AGPLv3 as a third option starting with Redis 8. Redis describes that addition as the inclusion of an option, not a license change: the dual-license versions stay as they were.

Redis Ltd. said the reason was cloud providers. In its 20 March 2024 announcement it said most of its commercial sales are channelled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis's investments and its open source community. Under the new license, a cloud provider hosting Redis as a managed service, or offering Redis as a service, can no longer use the source code free of charge: it needs a commercial license from Redis Ltd. first. For end users running Redis for internal or personal use, Redis said nothing changes. Redis later acknowledged that the move hurt its relationship with the community, because SSPL is not an OSI-approved license, and it then added the GNU Affero General Public License as a further option from Redis 8. The Linux Foundation's Valkey announcement lists Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud among its supporters, and the Redis license change is why the two projects are now compared at all.

The Redis Source Available License v2 (RSALv2) is a permissive, non-copyleft license that lets you use, copy, modify and distribute the software. It has two main limits: you may not commercialize it or provide it to others as a managed service, and you may not remove licensing notices. The Server Side Public License v1 (SSPLv1) is based on the GNU Affero General Public License, with a changed network-use section: if you offer the software to third parties as a service, you must release the source of the whole service stack, including management, monitoring and hosting software, under the SSPL. The GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3) is a copyleft license whose network clause applies when you modify the program: your modified version must offer every user who interacts with it remotely the corresponding source.

Redis defines a prohibited “competitive offering” as a product sold to third parties, derived from the Redis code base, that significantly overlaps a Redis commercial product, including hosting or embedding Redis as part of a solution sold competitively against Redis Enterprise or Redis Cloud. Its FAQ says that hosting Redis for your own organization is permitted, that building a solution that uses Redis without competing with it has no impact, and that systems integrators can keep providing professional services around Redis.

The license is rarely the only input. Redis 8 brings JSON, time series, probabilistic types, the query engine and vector sets, previously the Redis Stack modules, into core Redis, and says it delivered over 30 performance improvements. Valkey is the choice when your legal team wants a permissive license and a foundation behind it. Migrating from Redis 7.2 or earlier to Valkey is effectively an upgrade: Valkey uses the same wire protocol, configuration format and RDB and AOF file formats as Redis OSS 7.2. Data files from Redis 7.4 and later are not compatible with Valkey, so a move from 7.4 or Redis 8 is a data migration to plan, not a binary swap.

The license decides who may host and sell Redis. It does not decide who can support your deployment, and Redis's own FAQ answers yes to the question of whether professional services around Redis can continue. What changes with the path is who patches the version you run. AceMQ supports every Redis line, Redis 8 and Valkey on the same 24/7 terms, with a 15-minute emergency response on the support plan, and its OSSeva team backports CVE fixes for Redis 7.2, 7.0 and 6.2.

Redis Enterprise is a separate commercial product, not a license you need to run open-source Redis. Buy it for active-active geo-replication, the enterprise modules or its management layer; an estate that needs none of those is fully supportable on open source or Valkey.

Three checks cover most estates. List every Redis version in production and note which are 7.4 or later. Write down whether anyone modifies Redis or ships it inside a product. Ask legal whether AGPLv3, RSALv2 or BSD is acceptable for each. If the answer is Valkey, plan the move once, and pick a target version that will still be supported when the work finishes. If the answer is Redis 8, check the client libraries and modules first. AceMQ will tell you plainly whether a move is worth doing for your workload, and supports Redis and Valkey in production either way.