TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data vs. Vertica Analytics Database

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    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

    Vertica Analytics Database

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AThe Vertica Analytics Platform supplies enterprise data warehouses with big data analytics capabilities and modernization. Vertica was acquired and supported by OpenText, then sold to Rocket Software in 2026.N/A
    Pricing
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataVertica Analytics Database
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataVertica Analytics Database
    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.dataVertica Analytics Database
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Rocket Software
    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.dataVertica Analytics Database
    Vector Database
    Comparison of Vector Database features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and Vertica Analytics Database
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    8.0
    12 Ratings
    1% above category average
    Vertica Analytics Database
    -
    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
    Best Alternatives
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataVertica Analytics Database
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    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.dataVertica Analytics Database
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (46 ratings)
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    Usability
    7.8
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    7.9
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (44 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataVertica Analytics Database
    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
    Rocket Software
    Vertica as a data warehouse to deliver analytics in-house and even to your client base on scale is not rivaled anywhere in the market. Frankly, in my experience it is not even close to equaled. Because it is such a powerful data warehouse, some people attempt to use it as a transactional database. It certainly is not one of those. Individual row inserts are slow and do not perform well. Deletes are a whole other story. RDBMS it is definitely not. OLAP it rocks.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Rocket Software
    • Extremely fast query performance - Vertica is one of the fastest query engines out there.
    • Scales to TBs - Scales reasonably well up to 10-20 nodes and 10 - 100s of TB of data.
    • Easy to Use - Fairly easy to user, we made quite some headway with just 1 person running it for a while.
    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
    Rocket Software
    • Could use some work on better integrating with cloud providers and open source technologies. For AWS you will find an AMI in the marketplace and recently a connector for loading data from S3 directly was created. With last release, integration with Kafka was added that can help.
    • Managing large workloads (concurrent queries) is a bit challenging.
    • Having a way to provide an estimate on the duration for currently executing queries / etc. can be helpful. Vertica provides some counters for the query execution engine that are helpful but some may find confusing.
    • Unloading data over JDBC is very slow. We've had to come up with alternatives based on vsql, etc. Not a very clean, official on how to unload data.
    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
    Rocket Software
    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
    Read full review
    Rocket Software
    I haven't had any recent opportunity to reach out to Vertica support. From what I remember, I believe whenever I reached out to them the experience was smooth.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Rocket Software
    Vertica performs well when the query has good stats and is tuned well. Options for GUI clients are ugly and outdated. IO optimized: it's a columnar store with no indexing structures to maintain like traditional databases. The indexing is achieved by storing the data sorted on disk, which itself is run transparently as a background process.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Rocket Software
    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
    Rocket Software
    • Positive impact on ROI by being able to get customer insights in real-time.
    • Positive ROI through reduced time to set-up and maintain Vertica instances.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots