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Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data vs. InterSystems Caché (legacy product)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AAstra DB is a vector database for developers. In 2025 Datastax, the developer and supporter of Astra DB, was acquired. Astra DB is now available as a component of the IBM watsonx.data Multicloud offering.N/A

    InterSystems Caché (legacy product)

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AInterSystems Caché® was a multi-modal operational database for transaction processing applications, that provided several APIs to operate with same data simultaneously: key-value, relational, object, document, and multidimensional.N/A
    Pricing
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataInterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataInterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataInterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    46 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    45 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    45 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    44 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataInterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Vector Database
    Comparison of Vector Database features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and InterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    8.0
    12 Ratings
    1% above category average
    InterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    -
    Ratings
    Vector Data Connection8.212 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vector Data Editing8.56 Ratings00 Ratings
    Attribute Management7.710 Ratings00 Ratings
    Geospatial Analysis8.26 Ratings00 Ratings
    Geometric Transformations8.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vector Data Visualization8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    Coordinate Reference System Management:7.96 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Import/Export8.011 Ratings00 Ratings
    Symbolization and Styling8.35 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Sharing and Collaboration7.69 Ratings00 Ratings
    User Ratings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataInterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (46 ratings)
    4.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    7.8
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (44 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataInterSystems Caché (legacy product)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    We've been super happy with Astra DB. It's been extremely well-suited for our vector search needs as described in previous responses. With Astra DB’s high-performance vector search, Maester’s AI dynamically optimizes responses in real-time, adapting to new user interactions without requiring costly retraining cycles.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    It's definitely great for medical industries that need the vast amounts of features/security/performance, however if you need something simple then this would be too much. There is a learning curve, and if you come from more common database technologies, then there will be a lot of differences to handle. Simple database needs would be better fulfilled elsewhere, but Cache is for when you need to take the next step, whether that be in the volume, complexity, or security of ETL.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
    • Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
    • A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • Performance
    • Robustness
    • Reliable
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Need better fine-grained Security options.
    • The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken.
    • They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • The IDE IntelliSense needs to be improved.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring are all incorporated into a single platform by Astra DB. Mongo Db is a self-managed infrastructure. Astra DB has Wide column store and Mongo DB has Document store. The best thing is that Astra DB operates on Java while Mongo DB operates on C++
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    I've only worked with products that do one thing before, but there's so much that Cache offers versus piecing different services together manually. Not only does the product offer a more robust tool-set, but the support is wonderful and I've never encountered a better vendor in any industry in terms of how well they interact with their customers and care about helping you solve your problems. They want you to grow and to get better.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.
    Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Better uptime due to the managed service having no outages
    • Less technical debt because we don't need to worry about upgrading our Cassandra clusters
    • Lower cost on infrastructure as a whole
    • Quick and easy to integrate vector search into our tech stack
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • Implementation time could be speeded up
    • It is very flexible and attractive
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    InterSystems Caché (legacy product) Screenshots

    Screenshot of The structure of InterSystems Caché Database Engine