Redis Cloud vs Dragonfly Cloud: choose the engine before the scaling model

Choose Redis Cloud if staying on Redis is the priority and your team can own capacity decisions. Dragonfly Cloud means adopting a separate, company-controlled engine whose Swarm scaling requires cluster-aware clients. The choice reaches beyond today’s memory needs to who controls future engine releases and how your application will grow. Neither service offers Valkey.

At a glance

About Redis Cloud

Redis Cloud is Redis’s managed database service, offered through Essentials and Pro plans. It runs the Redis engine and provides hosted databases with managed client routing. Cloud availability, capacity, and connectivity options depend on the plan.

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 22, 2026 - Redis announced Smooth Scaling for Cloud Pro. It improves the resize process but leaves capacity decisions with your team. When comparing it with Dragonfly, evaluate who initiates growth separately from the client integration each scaling approach requires.

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 who controls your engine’s future

Moving from Redis Cloud to Dragonfly changes the engine without removing single-company licensing control. Dragonfly is maintained by one company, which can change the license for future releases. That dependency matters if you expect to build on the engine for years. (Dragonfly license, maintainer discussion)

Redis’s March 2024 licensing change, starting with version 7.4, shows why future release terms deserve attention alongside hosted features. Momento’s account of the Redis licensing change explains the concern.

Decide how growth reaches your application

With Redis Cloud Pro, your team decides when to add memory or throughput. Its proxy handles shard routing, so customer-directed resizing does not mean every client must discover individual shards. (Redis Cloud proxy)

Dragonfly’s cluster mode must be chosen when you create the datastore and cannot change afterward. Swarm requires cluster-aware clients, so the scaling choice affects application integration from the start. Memory and compute can resize, and Business lists autoscaling. (Dragonfly datastore options, plans and pricing)

Size for connections and sustained traffic

Redis Essentials tops out at 10,000 concurrent connections. A growing client population can push you toward Pro even before memory becomes the constraint. Pro has no fixed database-level connection cap, but infrastructure and workload still limit practical capacity.

For Dragonfly, size steady traffic against baseline bandwidth. The AWS Standard 12.5 GB configuration lists 0.5 Gbps baseline and 10 Gbps temporary, nonguaranteed burst. (Dragonfly bandwidth)

Try Momento Cache

For a workload whose client fleet is growing, consider Momento for dedicated Valkey with managed client integration and built-in autoscaling.

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 deployments qualify for the top uptime commitments?

Redis Cloud’s 99.999% commitment applies to qualifying Active-Active deployments. Dragonfly’s 99.95% applies to Multi-AZ HA. Redis Active-Active measures deployment-wide availability, while Dragonfly averages shard availability. (Redis Cloud SLA, Dragonfly SLA)

Does Redis Cloud require clients to route requests between shards?

Redis Cloud’s proxy endpoint handles shard routing for clients. That can simplify application integration compared with Swarm’s requirement for cluster-aware clients.

What support is available for urgent incidents?

Redis Cloud offers support response from 15 minutes. Dragonfly offers support response from 1 hour.