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Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data vs. Amazon Redshift

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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

    Amazon Redshift

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.

    $0.24

    per GB per month

    Pricing
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataAmazon Redshift
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Redshift Managed Storage
    $0.24
    per GB per month
    Current Generation
    $0.25 - $13.04
    per hour
    Previous Generation
    $0.25 - $4.08
    per hour
    Redshift Spectrum
    $5.00
    per terabyte of data scanned
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataAmazon Redshift
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    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.dataAmazon Redshift
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    46 Answers
    78%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    45 Answers
    82%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    45 Answers
    78%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    44 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    Features
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataAmazon Redshift
    Vector Database
    Comparison of Vector Database features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and Amazon Redshift
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    8.0
    12 Ratings
    1% above category average
    Amazon Redshift
    -
    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
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    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataAmazon Redshift
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    Medium-sized Companies
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    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataAmazon Redshift
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (46 ratings)
    9.0
    (38 ratings)
    Usability
    7.8
    (4 ratings)
    9.0
    (10 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (44 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataAmazon Redshift
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
    • [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
    • [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
    • [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
    • Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
    • Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
    Incentivized
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    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
    Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
    Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
    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
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
    • Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
    • Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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