Apache Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Bigtable

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cassandra
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cassandra is a no-SQL database from Apache.N/A
Google Cloud Bigtable
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
Google's Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads with up to 99.999% availability.
$0.03
per month per GB
Pricing
Apache CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Backup Storage
$0.026
per month per GB
HDD storage
$0.026
per month per GB
SSD storage
$0.17
per month per GB
Nodes
$0.65/hour
per month per node (minimum 1 nodes)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
Considered Both Products
Cassandra
Chose Cassandra
It was packaged with the vendor product we bought. Also, it’s good for high performance transactional systems. I'm part of our NoSQL team and Cassandra quickly became a favorite for developers with agile teams.
Chose Cassandra
DynamoDB is good and is also a truly global database as a service on AWS. However, if your organization is not using AWS, then Cassandra will provide a highly scalable and tuneable, consistent database.
Cassandra is also fault-tolerant and good for replication across multiple …
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra has its own use case. It performs very well as a data store. Data can be written to it at a high rate. It cannot be compared to traditional RDBMS like Oracle, because they all have their own usage. Even MongoDB, which is somewhat similar, cannot be stacked up against …
Chose Cassandra
We evaluated MongoDB also, but don't like the single point failure possibility. The HBase coupled us too tightly to the Hadoop world while we prefer more technical flexibility. Also HBase is designed for "cold"/old historical data lake use cases and is not typically used for …
Chose Cassandra
Technology selection should be done based on the need and not based on buzz words in the market (google searching). If your data need flat file approach and more searchable based on index and partition keys, then it's better to go for Cassandra. Cassandra is a better choice …
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra is the only NoSQL database I have extensive experience with. In terms of other open source database solutions, I can say that I like Cassandra as much or equally as traditional Oracle MySql, and a lot more than PostgresSQL. The decision to use Cassandra was driven by …
Chose Cassandra
Against HBASE, writes were faster. Reads not so much. Also ability to store in other formats would be good (such as objects). Compared to aerospike, does not compare. Aerospike blows it out of water.
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra does one thing very well. It's able to collect any type of metrics and analytics and store them at very fast speeds. But when it comes to reading the data, there are minor performance issues. That's when other databases such as couchdb or couchbase come in. They can …
Chose Cassandra

These are the features which makes Cassandra different from others:

  • Cassandra is a distributed datastore, with a built-in coordinator. This means that requests are intelligently forwarded to the correct node.
  • It is generally very fast, and especially shines with write heavy …
Chose Cassandra
Apache Cassandra has the best of both worlds, it is a Java based NoSQL, linearly scalable, best in class tunable performance across different workloads, fault tolerant, distributed, masterless, time series database. We have used both Apache HBase and MongoDB for some use cases …
Chose Cassandra
Four years ago, I needed to choose a web-scale database. Having used relational databases for years (PostgreSQL is my favorite), I needed something that could perform well at scale with no downtime. I considered VoltDB for its in-memory speed, but it's limited in scale. I …
Chose Cassandra
I tried to evaluate Cassandra against Voldemort and found Cassandra more efficient when writing scalable applications.
Chose Cassandra
We also evaluated mySQL and mongoDB. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses but they are less suited for storing massive amounts of time series data. In addition, they are not elastic by nature and we required a "future-proof" solution as it was difficult to estimate …
Chose Cassandra
Cassandra is well suited to more complex networks like multiple data centers. The underlying distributed systems logic is fundamentally sound.
Google Cloud Bigtable
Chose Google Cloud Bigtable
As a hosted solution, that can be managed easily from the Google cloud platform, it enables the teams to think about business use cases vs thinking about the management of the database itself. It is easily to scale it up when you need more throughput or storage. This keeps the …
Features
Apache CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache Cassandra
8.0
Ratings
9% below category average
Google Cloud Bigtable
-
Ratings
Performance8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability8.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Concurrency7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Security8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Data model flexibility6.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Apache Cassandra
-
Ratings
Google Cloud Bigtable
9.2
Ratings
8% above category average
Automatic software patching00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Database scalability00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automated backups00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Database security provisions00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
Likelihood to Recommend
6.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache CassandraGoogle Cloud Bigtable
Likelihood to Recommend
Cassandra excels in a broad range of applications -- especially if you understand its data model and write your applications accordingly. It's an excellent choice for time-series data, and a poor choice for application queues. It performs the best if you can simply record history and compute from it, rather than going back and editing or deleting things a lot.
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Google Bigtable is ONLY suited for massive data sets which scale PetaBytes and TerraBytes. Anything under this can easily be done via dedicated VMs and open source tools. Google Bigtable is expensive and shall be used wisely. It should be utilised only where it is well suited else you would simply be wasting dollars and not utilizing its full benefits.
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Pros
  • High Availability - we utilize the data replication features of Cassandra. This enables us to access our data even when several nodes have gone down
  • Data Locality - our architecture combines Cassandra storage nodes and computation nodes in the same machine. This enables us to utilize data locality and limit expensive network IO to read data.
  • Elasticity - Cassandra is a shared nothing architecture. Nodes can be added very easily and they discover the network topology. As soon as a node has joined the Cassandra ring, the data is redistributed among the existing nodes and streamed to it automatically.
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  • Analytics: is at Google's heart. No on can beat Google in this space and BigTable is one of its implementation of this. The insights you gain from BigTable are simply usable in your day to day activities and can help you make real difference.
  • Speed: Processing TBs and PBs of data under minutes needs real efficient platform which is capable of doing much more than just processing data. All this data cannot be processed by a single machine, but rather huge pairs of machines working in conjuction with each other. BigTable's implementation is one of the finest and allows you achieve great speeds!
  • Interface: is great. Google has segregated required task under logically placed buttons which takes no time by users to understand and get habituated.
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Cons
  • No Ad-Hoc Queries: Cassandra data storage layer is basically a key-value storage system. This means that you must "model" your data around the queries you want to surface, rather than around the structure of the data itself.
  • There are no aggregations queries available in Cassandra.
  • Not fit for transactional data.
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  • Global replication
  • Complete SQL support
  • Size limit of 1MB
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Likelihood to Renew
I would recommend Cassandra DB to those who know their use case very well, as well as know how they are going to store and retrieve data. If you need a guarantee in data storage and retrieval, and a DB that can be linearly grown by adding nodes across availability zones and regions, then this is the database you should choose.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.
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For big IT firms like us, data is very important and it only holds its value if it can make sense to us. Therefore, Bigtable's usability is priceless when it comes to decision making based on data.
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Support Rating
Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.
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Google provides premium support services for BigTable which is absolutely blazing fast similar to Bigtable's performance.
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Alternatives Considered
Apache Cassandra has the best of both worlds, it is a Java based NoSQL, linearly scalable, best in class
tunable performance across different workloads, fault tolerant, distributed, masterless, time series database. We have used both Apache HBase and MongoDB for some use cases which were within hadoop setup and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document store respectively, but given the overall factors favoring Apache Cassandra, it is a technology choice for multiple platforms!
Read full review
As a hosted solution, that can be managed easily from the Google cloud platform, it enables the teams to think about business use cases vs thinking about the management of the database itself. It is easily to scale it up when you need more throughput or storage. This keeps the developers and the product folks happy.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • The open source version of Cassandra is only suggested for learning the basic concepts and play with its core features. Unless you really want to invest a lot in your developers and architects knowing every detail of Cassandra, I prefer the DataStax enterprise version. Although the license cost is relatively high, I think they it is worth it. I'm thinking about the support, the monitoring tool OpsCenter, and the integration of Solr and Spark (for data analysis).
  • Cassandra didn't fully replace our old and traditional relation database Oracle. In addition, it opens another door for us to deal with some special business use cases that NoSQL database can do better in a more feasible and efficient way.
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  • Building new features that can leverage storage on the edge
  • Realtime decision making
  • Data enrichment
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