Garnet

Garnet is a remote cache-store from Microsoft Research. It uses the RESP protocol, which means existing Redis clients can connect to it, and it is built on .NET so it runs on Linux and Windows.

It is released under the MIT licence, a permissive open source licence, and it is free to use. It is run self-managed. There is no commercial edition, and the project's code is published on GitHub. The Azure Cosmos DB pricing page also lists a Garnet Cache, so Azure customers may be able to use it as part of a managed offering, although the details should be confirmed with Microsoft.

The latest release is v2.1.8, dated 16 September 2026, and the project is active. Teams should look at the release history to judge how long the current major version has been available before depending on it for important workloads.

Because Garnet speaks the RESP protocol, it can be tried by pointing an existing Redis client at it, which keeps the cost of evaluation low. Teams should still test the specific commands, data types and modules they use, since protocol compatibility does not mean every Redis feature is implemented.