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 6.8 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
Considered Both Products
Cassandra
Chose Cassandra
It was packaged with the vendor product we bought. Also, it’s good for high performance transactional systems. I'm part of our NoSQL team and Cassandra quickly became a favorite for developers with agile teams.
Chose Cassandra
DynamoDB is good and is also a truly global database as a service on AWS. However, if your organization is not using AWS, then Cassandra will provide a highly scalable and tuneable, consistent database.
Cassandra is also fault-tolerant and good for replication across multiple …
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra has its own use case. It performs very well as a data store. Data can be written to it at a high rate. It cannot be compared to traditional RDBMS like Oracle, because they all have their own usage. Even MongoDB, which is somewhat similar, cannot be stacked up against …
Chose Cassandra
We evaluated MongoDB also, but don't like the single point failure possibility. The HBase coupled us too tightly to the Hadoop world while we prefer more technical flexibility. Also HBase is designed for "cold"/old historical data lake use cases and is not typically used for …
Chose Cassandra
Technology selection should be done based on the need and not based on buzz words in the market (google searching). If your data need flat file approach and more searchable based on index and partition keys, then it's better to go for Cassandra. Cassandra is a better choice …
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra is the only NoSQL database I have extensive experience with. In terms of other open source database solutions, I can say that I like Cassandra as much or equally as traditional Oracle MySql, and a lot more than PostgresSQL. The decision to use Cassandra was driven by …
Chose Cassandra
Against HBASE, writes were faster. Reads not so much. Also ability to store in other formats would be good (such as objects). Compared to aerospike, does not compare. Aerospike blows it out of water.
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra does one thing very well. It's able to collect any type of metrics and analytics and store them at very fast speeds. But when it comes to reading the data, there are minor performance issues. That's when other databases such as couchdb or couchbase come in. They can …
Chose Cassandra

These are the features which makes Cassandra different from others:

  • Cassandra is a distributed datastore, with a built-in coordinator. This means that requests are intelligently forwarded to the correct node.
  • It is generally very fast, and especially shines with write heavy …
Chose Cassandra
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 …
Chose Cassandra
Four years ago, I needed to choose a web-scale database. Having used relational databases for years (PostgreSQL is my favorite), I needed something that could perform well at scale with no downtime. I considered VoltDB for its in-memory speed, but it's limited in scale. I …
Chose Cassandra
I tried to evaluate Cassandra against Voldemort and found Cassandra more efficient when writing scalable applications.
Chose Cassandra
We also evaluated mySQL and mongoDB. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses but they are less suited for storing massive amounts of time series data. In addition, they are not elastic by nature and we required a "future-proof" solution as it was difficult to estimate …
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra is well suited to more complex networks like multiple data centers. The underlying distributed systems logic is fundamentally sound.
Azure Cosmos DB
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB is more affordable than many other solutions and works incredibly well if you're within the Azure ecosystem.
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Because we often use Microsoft products for large corporate projects and other customer projects, and compatibility and integration are important to us, we used this platform, which in addition to very high security, has a very good response speed, also, building modern …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
We evaluated Mongo DB and Amazon Redshift. In the end, we decided to have both Redshift and Cosmos but for different app stacks. For apps hosted on Azure, Cosmos plays a very important role. Also from a support standpoint, Microsoft offers very good service and an equally good …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB has the benefit of having multi-master key tenancy compared to Redis and Mongo. Reads are just as fast, if not faster than Mongo. However, the distribution of writes (i.e. ACID transactions) isn't as high as Google Cloud Spanner or CouchDB. Azure Cosmos DB …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database & globally distributed NoSQL database service. Its very fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development DB platform compare to MongoDB.
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Our development and administration teams are just more familiar with the Microsoft Stack, and there was very little additional knowledge required to put this into production.
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Cosmos DB is unique in the industry as a true multi-model, cloud-native database engine that comes with solutions for geo-redundancy, multi-master writes, (globally!) low latency, and cost-effective hosting built in. I've yet to see anything else that even comes close to the …
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
Best Alternatives
Apache CassandraAzure Cosmos DB
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
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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