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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WRITER
Score 5.6 out of 10
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WRITER is an end-to-end platform for building, activating, and supervising AI agents across the enterprise. It empowers IT and business teams to collaboratively build agents that automate work, improve decision making, and drive business outcomes.
$39
per month per user
Pricing
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
WRITER
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$39
per month per user
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
WRITER
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
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
Community Pulse
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
WRITER
Features
Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
WRITER
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.
It is very easy to navigate, build, and contextually meld your agent into whatever you like. As long as you know how their back-end no-coding platform works, it becomes a breeze to create bespoke content that actually matters, and makes sense. We've done this with multiple agents and as I call it, "sub-functions". There's a lot more potential the agents can do, all you need to know is to just learn the process.
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.
i do find the organisation a bit confusing, like the functions available in 'ask Writer' being separate to the main window. there were lots of functions i wasn't able to find intuitively that we needed a support call for
asking for a summary of key points doesn't always pick up the main points
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++
WordPress is not very clear about the tools that are available with some themes over others. Instead, Write has multiple functions and makes the work complete in its entirety. It's easy to navigate and it also allows me to use multiple accounts. It has database links and at the same time it is compatible with MS office in all versions
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.
