Summary (TL;DR) Updated June 3rd, 2017 Redis is more powerful, more popular, and better supported than memcached. Memcached can only do a small fraction of the things Redis can do. Redis is better even where their features overlap. For anything new, use Redis. Memcached vs Redis: Direct Comparison Both tools are powerful, fast, in-memory data stores that are useful as a cache. Both can help speed