Memcached
The one that only caches — and does it without ceremony.
95
sovereigntyMemcached predates Redis and does one thing: a distributed in-memory key-value cache. No persistence, no data structures, no pub/sub, no clustering logic. BSD-3-Clause, and stable for so long that it is genuinely boring, which for infrastructure is a compliment. Listed because a great many Redis deployments are caching a string against a key and nothing more — and for that job Memcached uses less memory, has fewer failure modes, and gives you nothing to misconfigure. Ask what you are actually storing before you assume you need Redis.
OPEN SOURCEBSD-3-ClauseSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseBSD-3-Clause
PricingFree and open source.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +BSD-3-Clause and completely uncontroversial for two decades
- +Lower memory overhead than Redis for simple key-value caching
- +Very few moving parts, so very few ways to break it
- +Supported by every major managed cloud
Where it falls short
- −Caching only — no persistence, no data structures, no pub/sub
- −No replication or failover built in
- −Cannot serve as a queue, session store or message bus
- −Wrong tool the moment you need more than a cache
Memcached as an alternative to
Where Memcached shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Memcached head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.