What users are saying about
85 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.2 out of 100
Based on 85 reviews and ratings
36 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.3 out of 100
Based on 36 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
- Azure Cosmos DB ranks higher in 1 feature set: NoSQL Databases
NoSQL Databases

8.0
Cassandra
80%
8.6
Azure Cosmos DB
86%
Azure Cosmos DB ranks higher in 5/7 features
Azure Cosmos DB ranks higher in 5/7 features
Performance

8.5
85%
5 Ratings
8.2
82%
6 Ratings
Availability

8.8
88%
5 Ratings
9.5
95%
6 Ratings
Concurrency

7.6
76%
5 Ratings
8.1
81%
6 Ratings
Security

8.0
80%
5 Ratings
9.4
94%
6 Ratings
Scalability

9.5
95%
5 Ratings
8.6
86%
6 Ratings
Data model flexibility

6.7
67%
5 Ratings
8.1
81%
6 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility

7.0
70%
5 Ratings
8.5
85%
6 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Apache Cassandra is rated higher in 1 area: Likelihood to Renew
- Azure Cosmos DB is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
Likelihood to Recommend

6.0
Cassandra
60%
16 Ratings
8.4
Azure Cosmos DB
84%
6 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew

8.6
Cassandra
86%
16 Ratings
7.7
Azure Cosmos DB
77%
4 Ratings
Usability

7.0
Cassandra
70%
1 Rating
8.6
Azure Cosmos DB
86%
2 Ratings
Support Rating

7.0
Cassandra
70%
2 Ratings
9.4
Azure Cosmos DB
94%
2 Ratings
Implementation Rating

7.0
Cassandra
70%
2 Ratings
Azure Cosmos DB
N/A
0 Ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Cassandra
Apache Cassandra is a NoSQL database and well suited where you need highly available, linearly scalable, tunable consistency and high performance across varying workloads. It has worked well for our use cases, and I shared my experiences to use it effectively at the last Cassandra summit! http://bit.ly/1Ok56TKIt is a NoSQL database, finally you can tune it to be strongly consistent and successfully use it as such. However those are not usual patterns, as you negotiate on latency. It works well if you require that. If your use case needs strongly consistent environments with semantics of a relational database or if the use case needs a data warehouse, or if you need NoSQL with ACID transactions, Apache Cassandra may not be the optimum choice.
Staff Software Engineer
IntuitComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees
Azure Cosmos DB
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.
IT Operations and Support Specialist
AZEREX LLC.Information Technology & Services, 1-10 employees
Pros
Cassandra
- Continuous availability: as a fully distributed database (no master nodes), we can update nodes with rolling restarts and accommodate minor outages without impacting our customer services.
- Linear scalability: for every unit of compute that you add, you get an equivalent unit of capacity. The same application can scale from a single developer's laptop to a web-scale service with billions of rows in a table.
- Amazing performance: if you design your data model correctly, bearing in mind the queries you need to answer, you can get answers in milliseconds.
- Time-series data: Cassandra excels at recording, processing, and retrieving time-series data. It's a simple matter to version everything and simply record what happens, rather than going back and editing things. Then, you can compute things from the recorded history.
Chief Technology Officer
Algorithmic AdsMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
Azure Cosmos DB
- 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.
Solutions Architect
Netrix, LLCInformation Technology and Services, 201-500 employees
Cons
Cassandra
- Cassandra runs on the JVM and therefor may require a lot of GC tuning for read/write intensive applications.
- Requires manual periodic maintenance - for example it is recommended to run a cleanup on a regular basis.
- There are a lot of knobs and buttons to configure the system. For many cases the default configuration will be sufficient, but if its not - you will need significant ramp up on the inner workings of Cassandra in order to effectively tune it.

Verified User
Engineer in Research & Development
Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 employeesAzure Cosmos DB
- Expensive, so be careful of the use case.
- We had a thought time migrating from traditional DBs to Cosmos. Azure should provide a seamless platform for the migration of data from on-premises to cloud.

Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology
Pharmaceuticals Company, 10,001+ employeesPricing Details
Cassandra
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—Azure Cosmos DB
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—Likelihood to Renew
Cassandra
Cassandra 8.6
Based on 16 answers
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.

Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering
Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employeesAzure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB 7.7
Based on 4 answers
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.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employeesUsability
Cassandra
Cassandra 7.0
Based on 1 answer
It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.
Senior Software Engineer
USAAFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB 8.6
Based on 2 answers
It has very good compatibility and adaptability with other APIs and developers can safely create new apps because it is compatible with various tools and can be easily managed and run under the cloud, and in terms of security, it is one of the best of its kind, which is very powerful and excellent.
IT Operations and Support Specialist
AZEREX LLC.Information Technology & Services, 1-10 employees
Support Rating
Cassandra
Cassandra 7.0
Based on 2 answers
Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.
Senior Software Engineer
USAAFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB 9.4
Based on 2 answers
Microsoft is the best when it comes to after-sales support. They have a well-structured training and knowledge base portal that anyone can use. They are usually quick to respond to cases and are on point for on-call support. I have no complaints from a support standpoint. Pretty happy with the support.

Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology
Pharmaceuticals Company, 10,001+ employeesAlternatives Considered
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 web and mobile applications due to its performance concern. Cassandra, by contrast, offers the availability and performance necessary for developing highly available applications. Furthermore, the Hadoop technology stack is typically deployed in a single location, while in the big international enterprise context, we demand the feasibility for deployment across countries and continents, hence finally we are favor of Cassandra
IT Strategic Technical Advisor
FedEx ExpressPackage/Freight Delivery, 10,001+ employees
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 writes slower than Cassandra, but with Cosmos, we do not have to worry about replication or tools like Zookeeper to handle it. Azure Cosmos DB has it built-in.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Biotechnology Company, 11-50 employeesReturn on Investment
Cassandra
- I have no experience with this but from the blogs and news what I believe is that in businesses where there is high demand for scalability, Cassandra is a good choice to go for.
- Since it works on CQL, it is quite familiar with SQL in understanding therefore it does not prevent a new employee to start in learning and having the Cassandra experience at an industrial level.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 51-200 employeesAzure Cosmos DB
- Azure Cosmos DB may be expensive on its own, but it was cheaper than increasing the size/power of our VMs running SQL Server instances enough to keep up with the volume and velocity of the unstructured data.
- We got the JSON data out of our SQL Servers and they quit tipping over.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employees