memcached is multithreaded, so it scales up better per node.

memcached clients also frequently uses ketama consistent hashing, so it is much easier to do load/clustering, being much simpler than redis clustering (sentinel, etc).

Mcrouter[1] is also great for scaling memcached.

dragonfly, garnet, and pogocache are other alternatives too.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/mcrouter

Both Redis (finally) and Valkey addressed the multithreading scalability issues, see https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-21-redis-vs-memcache... and/or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860273...