Best Key-Value Databases

Compare the Top Key-Value Databases as of December 2025

What are Key-Value Databases?

Key-value databases are a type of NoSQL database that store data as pairs, where each unique key is associated with a value. This structure is simple and highly flexible, making key-value databases ideal for scenarios requiring fast access to data, such as caching, session management, and real-time applications. In these databases, the key acts as a unique identifier for retrieving or storing the value, which can be any type of data—strings, numbers, objects, or even binary data. Key-value stores are known for their scalability, performance, and ability to handle high volumes of read and write operations with low latency. These databases are particularly useful for applications that require quick lookups or high availability, such as online retail platforms, social networks, and recommendation systems. Compare and read user reviews of the best Key-Value Databases currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Dragonfly

    Dragonfly

    DragonflyDB

    Dragonfly is a drop-in Redis replacement that cuts costs and boosts performance. Designed to fully utilize the power of modern cloud hardware and deliver on the data demands of modern applications, Dragonfly frees developers from the limits of traditional in-memory data stores. The power of modern cloud hardware can never be realized with legacy software. Dragonfly is optimized for modern cloud computing, delivering 25x more throughput and 12x lower snapshotting latency when compared to legacy in-memory data stores like Redis, making it easy to deliver the real-time experience your customers expect. Scaling Redis workloads is expensive due to their inefficient, single-threaded model. Dragonfly is far more compute and memory efficient, resulting in up to 80% lower infrastructure costs. Dragonfly scales vertically first, only requiring clustering at an extremely high scale. This results in a far simpler operational model and a more reliable system.
    Starting Price: Free
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  • 2
    Redis

    Redis

    Redis Labs

    Redis Labs: home of Redis. Redis Enterprise is the best version of Redis. Go beyond cache; try Redis Enterprise free in the cloud using NoSQL & data caching with the world’s fastest in-memory database. Run Redis at scale, enterprise grade resiliency, massive scalability, ease of management, and operational simplicity. DevOps love Redis in the Cloud. Developers can access enhanced data structures, a variety of modules, and rapid innovation with faster time to market. CIOs love the confidence of working with 99.999% uptime best in class security and expert support from the creators of Redis. Implement relational databases, active-active, geo-distribution, built in conflict distribution for simple and complex data types, & reads/writes in multiple geo regions to the same data set. Redis Enterprise offers flexible deployment options, cloud on-prem, & hybrid. Redis Labs: home of Redis. Redis JSON, Redis Java, Python Redis, Redis on Kubernetes & Redis gui best practices.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    Amazon DynamoDB
    Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It's a fully managed, multi-region, Multimaster, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and can support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second. Many of the world's fastest-growing businesses such as Lyft, Airbnb, and Redfin as well as enterprises such as Samsung, Toyota, and Capital One depend on the scale and performance of DynamoDB to support their mission-critical workloads. Focus on driving innovation with no operational overhead. Build out your game platform with player data, session history, and leaderboards for millions of concurrent users. Use design patterns for deploying shopping carts, workflow engines, inventory tracking, and customer profiles. DynamoDB supports high-traffic, extreme-scaled events.
  • 4
    IBM Cloud Databases
    IBM Cloud Databases are open source data stores for enterprise application development. Built on a Kubernetes foundation, they offer a database platform for serverless applications. They are designed to scale storage and compute resources seamlessly without being constrained by the limits of a single server. Natively integrated and available in the IBM Cloud console, these databases are now available through a consistent consumption, pricing, and interaction model. They aim to provide a cohesive experience for developers that include access control, backup orchestration, encryption key management, auditing, monitoring, and logging.
  • 5
    ScyllaDB

    ScyllaDB

    ScyllaDB

    ScyllaDB is the database for data-intensive apps that require high performance and low latency. It enables teams to harness the ever-increasing computing power of modern infrastructures – eliminating barriers to scale as data grows. Unlike any other database, ScyllaDB is a distributed NoSQL database fully compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB, yet is built with deep architectural advancements that enable exceptional end-user experiences at radically lower costs. Over 400 game-changing companies like Disney+ Hotstar, Expedia, FireEye, Discord, Zillow, Starbucks, Comcast, and Samsung use ScyllaDB for their toughest database challenges. ScyllaDB is available as free open source software, a fully-supported enterprise product, and a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) on multiple cloud providers.
  • 6
    Azure Cosmos DB
    Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service for modern app development with guaranteed single-digit millisecond response times and 99.999-percent availability backed by SLAs, automatic and instant scalability, and open source APIs for MongoDB and Cassandra. Enjoy fast writes and reads anywhere in the world with turnkey multi-master global distribution. Reduce time to insight by running near-real time analytics and AI on the operational data within your Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL database. Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB seamlessly integrates with Azure Synapse Analytics without data movement or diminishing the performance of your operational data store.
  • 7
    Amazon ElastiCache
    Amazon ElastiCache allows you to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-Source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. Build data-intensive apps or boost the performance of your existing databases by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores. Amazon ElastiCache is a popular choice for real-time use cases like Caching, Session Stores, Gaming, Geospatial Services, Real-Time Analytics, and Queuing. Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached for your most demanding applications that require sub-millisecond response times. Amazon ElastiCache works as an in-memory data store and cache to support the most demanding applications requiring sub-millisecond response times. By utilizing an end-to-end optimized stack running on customer-dedicated nodes, Amazon ElastiCache provides secure, blazing-fast performance.
  • 8
    Macrometa

    Macrometa

    Macrometa

    We deliver a geo-distributed real-time database, stream processing and compute runtime for event-driven applications across up to 175 worldwide edge data centers. App & API builders love our platform because we solve the hardest problems of sharing mutable state across 100s of global locations, with strong consistency & low latency. Macrometa enables you to surgically extend your existing infrastructure to bring part of or your entire application closer to your end users. This allows you to improve performance, user experience, and comply with global data governance laws. Macrometa is a serverless, streaming NoSQL database, with integrated pub/sub and stream data processing and compute engine. Create stateful data infrastructure, stateful functions & containers for long running workloads, and process data streams in real time. You do the code, we do all the ops and orchestration.
  • 9
    Azure Cache for Redis
    As traffic and demands on your app increase, scale performance simply and cost-effectively. Add a quick caching layer to the application architecture to handle thousands of simultaneous users with near-instant speed—all with the benefits of a fully managed service. Superior throughput and performance to handle millions of requests per second with sub-millisecond latency. Fully managed service with automatic patching, updates, scaling, and provisioning so you can focus on development. RedisBloom, RediSearch, and RedisTimeSeries module integration, supporting data analysis, search, and streaming. Powerful capabilities including clustering, built-in replication, Redis on Flash, and availability of up to 99.99 percent. Complement database services like Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB by enabling your data tier to scale throughput at a lower cost than through expanded database instances.
    Starting Price: $1.11 per month
  • 10
    Couchbase

    Couchbase

    Couchbase

    Unlike other NoSQL databases, Couchbase provides an enterprise-class, multicloud to edge database that offers the robust capabilities required for business-critical applications on a highly scalable and available platform. As a distributed cloud-native database, Couchbase runs in modern dynamic environments and on any cloud, either customer-managed or fully managed as-a-service. Couchbase is built on open standards, combining the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL, to simplify the transition from mainframe and relational databases. Couchbase Server is a multipurpose, distributed database that fuses the strengths of relational databases such as SQL and ACID transactions with JSON’s versatility, with a foundation that is extremely fast and scalable. It’s used across industries for things like user profiles, dynamic product catalogs, GenAI apps, vector search, high-speed caching, and much more.
  • 11
    Google Cloud Bigtable
    Google Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads. Fast and performant: Use Cloud Bigtable as the storage engine that grows with you from your first gigabyte to petabyte-scale for low-latency applications as well as high-throughput data processing and analytics. Seamless scaling and replication: Start with a single node per cluster, and seamlessly scale to hundreds of nodes dynamically supporting peak demand. Replication also adds high availability and workload isolation for live serving apps. Simple and integrated: Fully managed service that integrates easily with big data tools like Hadoop, Dataflow, and Dataproc. Plus, support for the open source HBase API standard makes it easy for development teams to get started.
  • 12
    Symas LMDB

    Symas LMDB

    Symas Corporation

    Symas LMDB is an extraordinarily fast, memory-efficient database we developed for the OpenLDAP Project. With memory-mapped files, it has the read performance of a pure in-memory database while retaining the persistence of standard disk-based databases. Bottom line, with only 32KB of object code, LMDB may seem tiny. But it’s the right 32KB. Compact and efficient are two sides of a coin; that’s part of what makes LMDB so powerful. Symas offers fixed-price commercial support to those using LMDB in your applications. Development occurs in the OpenLDAP Project‘s git repo in the mdb.master branch. Symas LMDB has been written about, talked about, and utilized in a variety of impressive products and publications.
  • 13
    Google Cloud Memorystore
    Reduce latency with scalable, secure, and highly available in-memory service for Redis and Memcached. Memorystore automates complex tasks for open source Redis and Memcached like enabling high availability, failover, patching, and monitoring so you can spend more time coding. Start with the lowest tier and smallest size and then grow your instance with minimal impact. Memorystore for Memcached can support clusters as large as 5 TB supporting millions of QPS at very low latency. Memorystore for Redis instances are replicated across two zones and provide a 99.9% availability SLA. Instances are monitored constantly and with automatic failover—applications experience minimal disruption. Choose from the two most popular open source caching engines to build your applications. Memorystore supports both Redis and Memcached and is fully protocol compatible. Choose the right engine that fits your cost and availability requirements.
  • 14
    AsparaDB

    AsparaDB

    Alibaba

    ApsaraDB for Redis is an automated and scalable tool for developers to manage data storage shared across multiple processes, applications or servers. As a Redis protocol compatible tool, ApsaraDB for Redis offers exceptional read-write capabilities and ensures data persistence by using memory and hard disk storage. ApsaraDB for Redis provides data read-write capabilities at high speed by retrieving data from in-memory caches and ensures data persistence by using both memory and hard disk storage mode. ApsaraDB for Redis supports advanced data structures such as leaderboard, counting, session, and tracking, which are not readily achievable through ordinary databases. ApsaraDB for Redis also has an enhanced edition called "Tair" . Tair has officially handled the data caching scenarios of Alibaba Group since 2009 and has proven its outstanding performance in scenarios such as Double 11 Shopping Festival.
  • 15
    DataStax

    DataStax

    DataStax

    The Open, Multi-Cloud Stack for Modern Data Apps. Built on open-source Apache Cassandra™. Global-scale and 100% uptime without vendor lock-in. Deploy on multi-cloud, on-prem, open-source, and Kubernetes. Elastic and pay-as-you-go for improved TCO. Start building faster with Stargate APIs for NoSQL, real-time, reactive, JSON, REST, and GraphQL. Skip the complexity of multiple OSS projects and APIs that don’t scale. Ideal for commerce, mobile, AI/ML, IoT, microservices, social, gaming, and richly interactive applications that must scale-up and scale-down with demand. Get building modern data applications with Astra, a database-as-a-service powered by Apache Cassandra™. Use REST, GraphQL, JSON with your favorite full-stack framework Richly interactive apps that are elastic and viral-ready from Day 1. Pay-as-you-go Apache Cassandra DBaaS that scales effortlessly and affordably.
  • 16
    Oracle Database
    Oracle database products offer customers cost-optimized and high-performance versions of Oracle Database, the world's leading converged, multi-model database management system, as well as in-memory, NoSQL, and MySQL databases. Oracle Autonomous Database, available on-premises via Oracle Cloud@Customer or in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enables customers to simplify relational database environments and reduce management workloads. Oracle Autonomous Database eliminates the complexity of operating and securing Oracle Database while giving customers the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability. Oracle Database can be deployed on-premises when customers have data residency and network latency concerns. Customers with applications that are dependent on specific Oracle database versions have complete control over the versions they run and when those versions change.
  • 17
    ArangoDB

    ArangoDB

    ArangoDB

    Natively store data for graph, document and search needs. Utilize feature-rich access with one query language. Map data natively to the database and access it with the best patterns for the job – traversals, joins, search, ranking, geospatial, aggregations – you name it. Polyglot persistence without the costs. Easily design, scale and adapt your architectures to changing needs and with much less effort. Combine the flexibility of JSON with semantic search and graph technology for next generation feature extraction even for large datasets.
  • 18
    Hazelcast

    Hazelcast

    Hazelcast

    In-Memory Computing Platform. The digital world is different. Microseconds matter. That's why the world's largest organizations rely on us to power their most time-sensitive applications at scale. New data-enabled applications can deliver transformative business power – if they meet today’s requirement of immediacy. Hazelcast solutions complement virtually any database to deliver results that are significantly faster than a traditional system of record. Hazelcast’s distributed architecture provides redundancy for continuous cluster up-time and always available data to serve the most demanding applications. Capacity grows elastically with demand, without compromising performance or availability. The fastest in-memory data grid, combined with third-generation high-speed event processing, delivered through the cloud.
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