Depends on what you need, in general I think that:
- You should not care too much about performances. Redis is faster per core with small values, but memcached is able to use multiple cores with a single executable and TCP port without help from the client. Also memcached is faster with big values in the order of 100k. Redis recently improved a lot about big values (unstable branch) but still memcached is faster in this use case. The point here is: nor one or the other will likely going to be your bottleneck for the query-per-second they can deliver.
- You should care about memory usage. For simple key-value pairs memcached is more memory efficient. If you use Redis hashes, Redis is more memory efficient. Depends on the use case.
- You should care about persistence and replication, two features only available in Redis. Even if your goal is to build a cache it helps that after an upgrade or a reboot your data are still there.
- You should care about the kind of operations you need. In Redis there are a lot of complex operations, even just considering the caching use case, you often can do a lot more in a single operation, without requiring data to be processed client side (a lot of I/O is sometimes needed). This operations are often as fast as plain GET and SET. So if you don’t need just GET/SET but more complex things Redis can help a lot (think at timeline caching).
Without an use case is hard to pick the right now, but I think that for a lot of things Redis makes sense since even when you don’t want to use it as a DB, being a lot more capable you can solve more problems, not just caching but even messaging, ranking, and so forth.
P.s. of course I could be biased since I’m the lead developer of the Redis project.