Apache Cassandra vs. DataStax Enterprise

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
DataStax Enterprise
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
DataStax Enterprise (DSE) is the scale-out, cloud-native NoSQL database built on Apache Cassandra. DSE is Developer Ready providing developers the freedom of choice of REST, GraphQL, CQL and JSON/Document APIs.N/A
Pricing
Apache CassandraDataStax Enterprise
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CassandraDataStax Enterprise
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 CassandraDataStax Enterprise
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.
DataStax Enterprise
Chose DataStax Enterprise
I believe DataStax Enterprise is the best in class. There are some things that are different with the schema-less systems but I found DataStax Enterprise easiest to implement while evaluating. The replication is on par or better than others in practice. We are evaluating …
Chose DataStax Enterprise
DataStax Enterprise offered best-in-class write performance and scalability. The customer support team was very helpful in the adoption of new technology.
Chose DataStax Enterprise
DataStax has an amazing community built around it and is also Cassandra is an open-source technology. The customer support is quite good compared to other vendors. Though you initially need to spend some hefty amount on infrastructure, in the long run, it makes up for it. We …
Chose DataStax Enterprise
We chose datastax because we need a system always available and capable of ingesting a large amount of data per second, even if eventually consistent and with multi data center sync native support.

We considered Cloudera as an alternative using Kafka as the ingestion layer but …
Chose DataStax Enterprise
Amazon DynamoDB and Datastax Cassandra are similar on masterless architecture and principles, DynamoDB is managed and needs cost analysis. If you need to have better control, Datastax is better.

I also did a prototype with Google Spanner in one of the recent innovation days, it …
Features
Apache CassandraDataStax Enterprise
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache Cassandra
8.0
Ratings
10% below category average
DataStax Enterprise
8.0
Ratings
10% below category average
Performance8.50 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Availability8.80 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Concurrency7.60 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Security8.00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Scalability9.50 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Data model flexibility6.70 Ratings5.10 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility7.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache CassandraDataStax Enterprise
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
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Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
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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
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Score 7.4 out of 10
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Score 7.4 out of 10
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User Ratings
Apache CassandraDataStax Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
6.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache CassandraDataStax Enterprise
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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DataStax has a good scalable option with multiple clusters and a good write rate. Cassandra also is improving and is an open-source technology that has good community support. The UI is also easy to understand and implement required functions.
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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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  • Datastax Cassandra provides high availability and good performance for a database. It is built on top of open source Apache Cassandra so you can always somewhat understand the internal functioning and why.
  • Datastax Cassandra is fairly simple to start using, you can install/setup your cluster and be productive in 1 day.
  • Datastax Cassandra provides a lot of good detailed documentation, and when starting, the detailed free videos on the Datastax site and documentation are very helpful.
  • Datastax Enterprise Edition of Cassandra provides more tools, good support, and quick response SLA for enterprise business support.
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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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  • Cassandra is a bit difficult to learn and understand
  • The costs are slightly higher for our company
  • Hardware requirement is moderate to high at the beginning
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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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We will continue to use it because it scales well with commodity hardware and we are satisfied with the documentation and support.
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Usability
It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.
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There is a bit of a learning curve and tasks that are simple in traditional RDBMS systems can be complicated with DataStax Enterprise but once you get the hang of denormalizing data and getting the data model correct DataStax Enterprise is very usable. Usability from the developer's standpoint is very simple - the complication is on the architecture side with the data model.
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Support Rating
Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.
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We have had a few situations where we caused an outage or something has gone wrong and we are able to get a support person to offer live help within minutes. The escalation process is excellent - the best I've seen - and the support team is incredibly strong. Outside of emergencies, the team is very helpful with general questions and working through data model exercises and the subscription I believe still comes with some hours to help get the data model reviewed.
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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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I believe DataStax Enterprise is the best in class. There are some things that are different with the schema-less systems but I found DataStax Enterprise easiest to implement while evaluating. The replication is on par or better than others in practice. We are evaluating Astra in our test environment and that has additional benefits we are looking forward to using.
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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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  • Highly Scalable Database, Highly Available Services, and Platforms.
  • High Performance, Low Latency and Highest throughput across varying workloads.
  • Configured, Tuned and Monitored correctly works to provide the best user experience!
  • Negative: Maintenance and Debugging Corner Cases
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