Medis Alternative for iPhone: What to Use When You Need Redis on iOS

July 1, 2026 · Vladimir Chemeris

Written and maintained by Vladimir Chemeris, the developer of CacheDeck.

If you use Medis on your Mac and reach for your iPhone during an incident, you will discover the problem immediately: there is no Medis for iPhone. There is no Medis for iPad either. Medis is a macOS-only application, and its developer has not shipped an iOS version.

For engineers who rely on Medis at their desk, the on-call iPhone gap is real. This guide explains what Medis is, what it does well, why it does not extend to iOS, and what native iPhone app fills that role.

What Medis is

Medis is a free, open-source Redis GUI for macOS created by Nikolaj Schumacher. It is available on the Mac App Store and has been one of the most downloaded free Redis clients on macOS for years. The appeal is straightforward: clean native macOS interface, visual key browser organized by namespace, support for all standard Redis data types, and no cost.

Medis connects to Redis servers directly. It supports AUTH passwords and TLS connections. The key browser uses the colon-delimited namespace convention to render keys as a tree, which makes navigating large keyspaces significantly more comfortable than a flat list. You can view, edit, and delete keys across all Redis types (String, Hash, List, Set, Sorted Set, Stream) through a GUI rather than typing commands.

It is a well-built, actively maintained tool. For Redis work on a Mac, it is a reasonable first choice because it is free and usable.

What Medis does not support

Medis is macOS only. There is no iPhone app. There is no iPad app. There is no companion iOS application in development that has been announced. The project is focused on the Mac.

This is a deliberate scope, not an omission waiting to be fixed. Building a native iOS Redis client is a separate engineering effort from a macOS app: different UI paradigms, different lifecycle management, different Keychain APIs for credential storage, different networking constraints for mobile. Medis solves the macOS problem well. The iOS gap belongs to a different product.

Medis platform availability:

Platform	Medis
macOS	Available (free, Mac App Store)
iPhone	Not available
iPad	Not available
Windows / Linux	Not available
Web browser	Not available

The on-call iPhone scenario Medis cannot cover

The situation is predictable: a PagerDuty alert fires at 1 AM. A cache key is suspected to be missing or corrupted, causing elevated error rates. Your MacBook is in the next room. You have your iPhone in hand.

On your Mac, the workflow takes about ten seconds: open Medis, select the connection, search for the key, inspect the value. On iPhone without a purpose-built tool, your realistic options are:

Walk to the laptop, open it, wait for macOS to wake, open Medis
SSH into a bastion using Blink Shell or Prompt and run redis-cli commands manually
Open a browser and try to reach a RedisInsight web instance if one is deployed and accessible

None of these are the “ten-second key inspection” that Medis provides on macOS. For engineers on call with an iPhone, the gap between a great desktop tool and a mobile-hostile workflow is the core problem.

CacheDeck: the native iPhone Redis client

CacheDeck key browser on iPhone, a native Medis alternative for iOS showing the Redis keyspace as a namespace tree — Native iPhone key browser: namespace tree, pattern search, type badges, TTL, the Medis workflow adapted for a phone

CacheDeck is a native iPhone application built for Redis access. It is not a macOS app adapted for a smaller screen, and not a web interface wrapped in a WKWebView. Every screen is designed for touch-first interaction on a 6-inch display.

The key browser follows the same namespace-tree convention that Medis uses on macOS. Keys delimited by colons are grouped into expandable namespaces. You can filter by glob pattern, browse by type, and tap any key to see its full value, TTL, and encoding, without typing a Redis command.

What CacheDeck provides:

Visual key browser: namespace tree, glob filter, type badges (String, Hash, List, Set, ZSet, Stream), TTL display, value viewer for each type
SSH tunnel built in: configure your bastion host once; CacheDeck opens the tunnel automatically on each connection; private keys (Ed25519 and RSA) are stored in iOS Secure Enclave
TLS and mTLS: connect to ElastiCache, Azure Cache for Redis, Upstash, and any TLS endpoint; client certificates stored in iOS Keychain
CLI console: run any Redis command, see raw responses, command history persisted across sessions
Server stats: memory usage, hit rate, connected clients, keyspace parsed from INFO, readable on a phone screen
Production safety classifier: connections matching prod, prd, or production in name or hostname are labeled PROD; all destructive writes require an extra confirmation tap

Price: $14.99 one-time. No subscription. No seat fee.

Feature comparison: CacheDeck vs Medis on iPhone

Feature	CacheDeck (iPhone)	Medis (iPhone)
Available on iPhone	Yes	No
Native app	Yes	No
Namespace key browser	Yes	No
SSH tunnel	Yes	No
TLS / mTLS	Yes	No
CLI console	Yes	No
Server stats (INFO)	Yes	No
Production safety guard	Yes	No
All Redis data types	Yes	No
Price	$14.99 one-time	No iPhone app

The comparison is structurally one-sided because Medis does not exist on iPhone. The table is not meant to suggest Medis is inferior; it is a different tool on a different platform. On macOS, Medis and CacheDeck both provide a visual key browser and Redis type support; the choice there comes down to preference and whether you want to pay for CacheDeck’s additional features. On iPhone, the choice is CacheDeck or a manual terminal workflow.

Connecting CacheDeck to the same Redis servers as Medis

CacheDeck SSH tunnel setup on iPhone, enter the same bastion host credentials used in Medis on macOS — SSH tunnel configuration: the same bastion host, port, and key pair you use in Medis on macOS

If you already have Redis connections set up in Medis on your Mac, you can replicate them in CacheDeck using the same credentials. There is no connection export from Medis to CacheDeck; you enter the details once manually.

For direct connections:

Use the same host, port, and AUTH password from your Medis connection

For TLS connections (ElastiCache, Azure Cache, Upstash):

Same host and port; enable TLS in CacheDeck
For services that use public CA certificates, no custom CA import is required

For SSH tunnel connections:

Same bastion host, SSH port, and username from your Medis config
Import your private key into CacheDeck: Ed25519 or RSA are both supported; CacheDeck stores it in iOS Secure Enclave rather than in a file

After the initial setup, CacheDeck saves connection details in iOS Keychain. Reconnecting is one tap, with the SSH tunnel opening automatically in the background.

The honest trade-off

Medis is a well-designed, free Redis GUI for macOS. If you are working at a desk with a Mac, Medis is a solid choice, especially because it costs nothing and covers the core key-browsing workflow cleanly. If you are comparing Medis against CacheDeck on macOS specifically, the differences come down to SSH tunnel support and TLS configuration: Medis does not handle SSH tunnels for servers behind a bastion, which CacheDeck does on both macOS (via third-party tools) and iOS natively.

The situation where Medis is not an option at all is iPhone. CacheDeck fills that gap. It is purpose-built for the on-call scenario where your Mac is not accessible and you need to inspect or adjust Redis state from a phone in under a minute.

If you use Medis on your Mac and carry an iPhone on call, CacheDeck is the tool that covers the hours when your Mac is not in reach.

Medis is an open-source project created by Nikolaj Schumacher and is available on the Mac App Store. CacheDeck is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Medis project or its author. Redis is a registered trademark of Redis Ltd. CacheDeck is not affiliated with Redis Ltd.