Aiven for Valkey vs Momento: grow without putting topology in your clients

Momento Cache lets your application grow behind a managed gateway that handles Valkey topology and scales to millions of clients. Aiven for Valkey ties growth and recovery options to your service and plan. Its clustering is in Limited Availability and requires a new service with cluster-aware clients. Choose Momento when you want dedicated Valkey capacity with fewer topology decisions in your application.

At a glance

About Aiven for Valkey

Aiven for Valkey is Aiven’s managed Valkey service, available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Its plans provide different capacity and replication configurations, with non-clustered and clustered service options. Aiven manages routine infrastructure and database operations.

Recent updates

September 2, 2026 - Momento introduced Cluster and Flex capacity for Momento Cache. Both provide dedicated, managed Valkey resources. Cluster exposes topology choices, while Flex selects topology within capacity bounds, giving teams a choice in how they configure capacity while Momento operates the cluster.

July 17, 2026 - Aiven made its Valkey 9 release the default for new services, leaving existing Valkey 8 services unaffected. Both Aiven and Momento offer Valkey 9. For a new deployment, that parity puts client integration, clustering access, and recovery choices ahead of the engine-major label.

Grow without changing how clients see the cluster

Momento keeps topology changes out of your client integration. Its managed gateway presents dedicated Valkey capacity through standalone-mode clients and handles backend routing. Applications use supported commands while Momento manages the cluster underneath.

Cluster and Flex give you two ways to control that capacity. With Cluster, you choose instances, shards, replicas, and zones. With Flex, you set capacity and replication bounds and Momento adjusts the topology within them. Both include the same built-in autoscaling. Momento manages health, failover, rolling updates, and security patches for both.

If you expect to shard, Aiven makes that an early service decision. Its clustering offering is in Limited Availability, requires cluster-aware clients, and supports new services only. An existing non-clustered service cannot enable it in place. That makes horizontal growth a migration decision as well as a capacity decision.

Choose the recovery behavior your workload needs

Aiven’s non-clustered Startup plan runs on one node. If that node is lost, Aiven restores a replacement from backup, leaving the service unavailable and losing writes made since the backup. Business and Premium add standbys and automatic failover. For data your application can regenerate, backup recovery may fit. For mutable state, recent writes may be harder to replace.

Momento gives you control over replication and zone placement while managing failover. Cluster exposes replica and zone choices directly. Flex lets you specify replication bounds and availability zones while Momento manages the topology. You can match the recovery design to the workload without taking on cluster maintenance.

Aiven and Momento each offer a 99.99% uptime SLA. (Aiven SLA, Momento SLA)

Give a growing audience room to connect

Momento’s gateway scales to millions of clients, handling connections, TLS, authentication, and routing in front of dedicated Valkey. Your application gets that connection infrastructure through familiar clients, leaving your team to focus on the traffic and capacity it needs.

Aiven ties its connection budget to server memory. Its 4 GB example estimates 16,384 concurrent connections, with actual limits varying by plan and provider. For a large client fleet, connection capacity becomes part of the sizing decision alongside the data you store.

Try Momento Cache

Momento Cache puts dedicated, high-performance Valkey behind a managed gateway that keeps client integration stable as your application grows. Choose Cluster for direct control over instance types, shards, and replicas, or Flex to set capacity and replication bounds while Momento selects the topology. Both include built-in autoscaling and fully managed cluster operations.

Talk to a Momento solution engineer to evaluate the capacity model and configuration that fit your workload.

Frequently asked questions

How do the pricing models compare?

Aiven starts at $45.70/GB-month, while Momento starts at $20.70/GB-month. Compare the capacity prices alongside the resources your application needs.

What support can teams expect during an incident?

Aiven offers support response from 15 minutes. Momento also offers support response from 15 minutes. One Momento support plan covers all products and associated accounts in your organization.

Can an Aiven clustered backup recover a consistent point in time?

Aiven backs up each primary independently, so a restored cluster need not represent one coordinated moment. This matters when your application needs consistency across shards.