Apache Cassandra vs. Azure Cosmos DB

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cassandra
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cassandra is a no-SQL database from Apache.N/A
Azure Cosmos DB
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's Big Data analysis platform. It is a NoSQL database service and is a replacement for the earlier DocumentDB NoSQL database.N/A
Pricing
Apache CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
Features
Apache CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache Cassandra
8.0
Ratings
10% below category average
Azure Cosmos DB
9.9
Ratings
11% above category average
Performance8.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Availability8.80 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Concurrency7.60 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Security8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Scalability9.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Data model flexibility6.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility7.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
User Ratings
Apache CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
Likelihood to Recommend
6.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
Likelihood to Recommend
Cassandra excels in a broad range of applications -- especially if you understand its data model and write your applications accordingly. It's an excellent choice for time-series data, and a poor choice for application queues. It performs the best if you can simply record history and compute from it, rather than going back and editing or deleting things a lot.
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NoSQL platforms are very useful when it comes to security, speed, accuracy, high accessibility with high read and write power. Everything is managed under the cloud and we have the various capabilities of Azure and support for Microsoft products with us. Flexibility in price and variety of features, as well as real-time results, are some of the popular [features] of this platform.
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Pros
  • High Availability - we utilize the data replication features of Cassandra. This enables us to access our data even when several nodes have gone down
  • Data Locality - our architecture combines Cassandra storage nodes and computation nodes in the same machine. This enables us to utilize data locality and limit expensive network IO to read data.
  • Elasticity - Cassandra is a shared nothing architecture. Nodes can be added very easily and they discover the network topology. As soon as a node has joined the Cassandra ring, the data is redistributed among the existing nodes and streamed to it automatically.
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  • Turn-key geo-redundancy with multi-master writes is unprecedented and unparalleled in the industry!
  • Guaranteed low latency makes Cosmos DB an excellent fit for most of our performance-intensive situations.
  • The tunable consistency model simplifies so many challenges in distributed systems engineering that otherwise require advanced knowledge of computer science topics. I continue to be impressed at how Cosmos DB has abstracted away so much complexity.
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Cons
  • No Ad-Hoc Queries: Cassandra data storage layer is basically a key-value storage system. This means that you must "model" your data around the queries you want to surface, rather than around the structure of the data itself.
  • There are no aggregations queries available in Cassandra.
  • Not fit for transactional data.
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  • When searching by default, it is case sensitive, which must be changed by default
  • In many ways, the price should be more flexible according to the requested facilities, because the price is very expensive for startup companies.
  • It is not fully compatible with most common Streaming Analytics tools applications and developers should be worked on it
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Likelihood to Renew
I would recommend Cassandra DB to those who know their use case very well, as well as know how they are going to store and retrieve data. If you need a guarantee in data storage and retrieval, and a DB that can be linearly grown by adding nodes across availability zones and regions, then this is the database you should choose.
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It's efficient, easy to scale, and works. We do have to do a bit of administration, but less now than when we started with this a couple of years ago. Microsoft continues to improve its self-management capability.
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Usability
It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.
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Like I said, Cosmos is the way to go. From all of the services that Azure has, Cosmos is very robust in terms of usability. It's ever-evolving and integrates with other applications seamlessly. The interface is pretty easy to understand. I implemented various solutions for my company and Cosmos was one of them.
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Support Rating
Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.
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The support team is very responsive and we are generally satisfied with Microsoft support, in my opinion support team of a product and service is just as valuable as its quality and performance. Telephone answering, 24-hour hotline, email support and ticketing are excellent.
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Alternatives Considered
Apache Cassandra has the best of both worlds, it is a Java based NoSQL, linearly scalable, best in class
tunable performance across different workloads, fault tolerant, distributed, masterless, time series database. We have used both Apache HBase and MongoDB for some use cases which were within hadoop setup and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document store respectively, but given the overall factors favoring Apache Cassandra, it is a technology choice for multiple platforms!
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Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB is more affordable than many other solutions and works incredibly well if you're within the Azure ecosystem.
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Return on Investment
  • The open source version of Cassandra is only suggested for learning the basic concepts and play with its core features. Unless you really want to invest a lot in your developers and architects knowing every detail of Cassandra, I prefer the DataStax enterprise version. Although the license cost is relatively high, I think they it is worth it. I'm thinking about the support, the monitoring tool OpsCenter, and the integration of Solr and Spark (for data analysis).
  • Cassandra didn't fully replace our old and traditional relation database Oracle. In addition, it opens another door for us to deal with some special business use cases that NoSQL database can do better in a more feasible and efficient way.
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  • Expensive but works if your infra is on Azure data center.
  • No latency and nearly no downtime.
  • Takes time for end users to adapt.
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