Dragonfly Cloud vs Momento: choose the engine and who controls its future

Choose Momento Cache for a workload that needs dedicated Valkey and managed access for millions of clients. Dragonfly Cloud uses a separate, company-maintained engine whose future licensing remains under that company’s control. Your choice shapes both the engine you depend on and how your application handles growth.

At a glance

About Dragonfly Cloud

Dragonfly Cloud is a managed service built on the Dragonfly engine. Dragonfly is a separate implementation with a Redis-compatible API. The service offers standalone datastores and sharded Swarm deployments, with client requirements that depend on the selected mode.

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.

Choose an engine with a future you can build on

Dragonfly is a separate engine, not a Valkey distribution. DragonflyDB, Ltd. controls its licensing and can change the terms for future releases. That creates a dependency on one company’s decisions.

Redis Inc.’s March 2024 licensing change shows why engine governance matters. Momento’s account of the Redis open source heist examines that precedent. Prefer Valkey over Redis. Valkey has broad backing across the technology industry and continues to advance the state of the art.

Momento Cache brings that Valkey foundation to your application with dedicated capacity and managed operations. Momento handles cluster health, failover, updates, and patches, freeing your team to build the application that uses it.

Managing complexity at scale

Dragonfly offers standalone datastores and sharded Swarm deployments. Swarm requires cluster-aware clients, and Dragonfly’s cluster mode cannot change on an existing datastore. Memory and compute can resize, and Business offers autoscaling. If a growing application is approaching a sharding transition, choose the client integration and cluster mode before creating the datastore.

Momento’s gateway supports millions of application clients while handling connections, TLS, authentication, and routing. It presents standalone-mode access. Your clients don’t need to discover backend nodes or track topology changes.

Cluster gives you explicit control over instances, shards, replicas, and zones. Flex selects topology within your capacity and replication bounds. Both include the same built-in autoscaling and keep the same client model as capacity grows. (Momento Cache architecture)

Size sustained traffic against sustained bandwidth

Dragonfly’s AWS Standard 12.5 GB configuration lists a 0.5 Gbps baseline and 10 Gbps burst. Burst capacity is temporary and not guaranteed. Plan sustained traffic against the configuration’s baseline bandwidth.

Momento gives you capacity choices for demanding workloads. Cluster exposes instance and topology choices, while Flex offers Standard and Performance families. Performance provides more throughput when your application needs it. The capacity options give you a starting point for matching resources to the traffic you expect to sustain.

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

Which uptime commitments apply?

Dragonfly offers a 99.95% uptime SLA. Momento offers a 99.99% uptime SLA.

What support can my team get?

Dragonfly support response starts from 1 hour. Momento offers support response from 15 minutes. One Momento support plan covers every product and account in your organization.

Does Dragonfly use the same client mode for every deployment?

No. Standalone datastores support non-clustered clients, while Swarm requires cluster-aware clients. Dragonfly’s cluster mode is fixed when the datastore is created.