Redis › Redis vs Memcached

What are the fundamental differences between Redis and Memcached as caching solutions?

Beginner

Answer

Redis supports a wide variety of rich data structures like hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets, along with features like persistence, replication, and Pub/Sub, while Memcached is a simpler, purely in memory key value store focused specifically on caching, generally using a multi threaded architecture that can offer very high throughput for simple string based caching workloads.
-- Redis: rich data types available
ZADD leaderboard 100 'player1'

-- Memcached: simple key value only
set mykey 0 3600 5
value
Real-world example A team choosing between the two for a simple session caching need with no complex data requirements considers Memcached for its straightforward simplicity, while another team building a leaderboard feature chooses Redis specifically for its native sorted set support.

Common follow-ups: Does Memcached support any form of data persistence?;Which of the two is generally easier to set up for a very basic caching need?