Astra 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.
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Saturn Cloud
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Saturn Cloud is an ML platform for individuals and teams, available on multiple clouds: AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. It provides access to computing resources with customizable amounts of memory and power, including GPUs and Dask distributed computing clusters, in a wholly hosted environment. Saturn Cloud is presented as flexible and straightforward for new data scientists while giving senior and experienced staff the
capabilities and configurability they need.…
$10
hourly $5 credit purchase to start
Pricing
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
Saturn Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
Saturn Cloud
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Features
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
Saturn Cloud
Vector Database
Comparison of Vector Database features of Product A and Product B
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.
Saturn Cloud is a powerful data science platform that offers numerous benefits to organizations. It simplifies and streamlines the development, deployment, and scaling of data science and machine learning models. The platform addresses common business problems such as scalability, collaboration, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. With Saturn Cloud, organizations can easily handle large datasets and complex computations, collaborate effectively among data science teams, automate repetitive tasks, optimize workflows, and utilize flexible and cost-efficient cloud resources. By leveraging Saturn Cloud, organizations can accelerate their data science projects, improve productivity, and achieve better outcomes in areas such as predictive modeling, recommendation systems, fraud detection, and more.
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.
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.
While Saturn Cloud offers a range of pre-built templates and workflows, there is currently limited support for customization. For example, users may not be able to modify the pre-configured environments that come with the templates, or may find it difficult to integrate their own custom libraries and tools. Offering more flexibility in this area could help users tailor the platform to their specific needs and workflows.
While Saturn Cloud offers a variety of pre-built environments for data science and machine learning workloads, some users may prefer to use custom Docker images instead. However, the platform currently has limited support for Docker, which can be a limitation for users who need to work with specific dependencies or custom libraries. Adding more robust support for Docker could help to make the platform more versatile and adaptable to a wider range of use cases.
This is user friendly , better than its counterparts. Anyone familiar working with other cloud solutions for GPU will agree on this. Hence the rating of 10 was given to this. I personally love the fact that I get so much compute time for being a free user which is very efficient in terms of budget
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.
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++
Saturn Cloud provides an R server, that's super important. Even you can write R on CoLab with different settings, but it is inconvenient and slow. Saturn Cloud can give me a different IDE environment that I'm more used to, even if I'm using Python. Whereas CoLab is more dedicated to Jupyter notebook
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.
Although we are still in the implementation phase with Saturn Cloud, we anticipate significant positive impacts on our business objectives.
The platform is expected to enhance our computational capabilities with its easy access to top-tier NVIDIA GPUs, which should accelerate our AI and machine learning projects. We believe this will lead to reduced development times and faster deployment of our generative AI models.
While Saturn Cloud provides excellent computational resources and reliable uptime, I find that their user interface could be improved. The UI can be unintuitive at times, making it a bit challenging to navigate and configure certain settings. Enhancing the user interface to be more streamlined and user-friendly would significantly improve the overall experience. Having pre-configured stacks readily available would also save time and make the platform even more efficient to use.
