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Cassandra vs Faiss comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cassandra
Ranking in Vector Databases
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (7th)
Faiss
Ranking in Vector Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 2.3%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Faiss is 5.1%, down from 12.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Faiss5.1%
Cassandra2.3%
Other92.6%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Monirul Islam Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Head, Data Integration & Management at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees
Has maintained secure document storage and efficient data distribution with peer-to-peer architecture
The functions or features in Cassandra that I have found most valuable are that it is a distributed system similar to Mongo. It's good enough for comparison with another SQL database, so it's smooth and organized for distributed database system. The peer-to-peer architecture in Cassandra is helpful for network decentralization, and I have already introduced that feature. Cassandra features in peer-to-peer as well as another monitoring, so basically, it's good enough for our service. The tunable consistency level in Cassandra is good, and we are using that feature already. In terms of built-in caching and lightweight transactions in Cassandra, the transaction level is good, and it's optimized, so there are no more issues in that database. Based on my experience, Cassandra is good for document management system, as well as distributed database system, and the automatic recovery process is there. Additionally, the database monitoring system or auditing system is well-comparable with other database systems, so we are actually happy to be using this Cassandra database.
Kalindu Sekarage - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer
Integration improves accuracy and supports token-level embedding
The best features FAISS offers for my team include seamless integration with Colbert and the ability to use FAISS via the Ragatouille framework, which is tailor-made for using the Colbert model. Feature-wise, FAISS allows for more accurate result retrieval, and retrieval speed is also good when comparing the index size. Regarding features, I also emphasize that the usability of FAISS is very seamless, particularly its integration with Colbert and Ragatouille. FAISS has positively impacted my organization by helping us increase the accuracy of retrieval documents; when we store documents in token-level embedding, the accuracy will be high. Additionally, we do not need any external server to host FAISS, allowing us to integrate it with our backend framework, making it a very flexible framework.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Our primary use case for the solution is testing."
"I am satisfied with the performance."
"The most valuable features are the counter features and the NoSQL schema. It also has good scalability. You can scale Cassandra to any finite level."
"Since I haven't had years of experience with it, it's still new to me. One valuable feature is its distribution, so I can run it partly in the cloud and part on-prem. That's a feature I'd like to use but haven't yet because we're trying to move to Azure. I don't know if or when that will happen. Ideally, we'd have it distributed over the cloud and on-prem simultaneously, so if something happens to our on-prem, we can keep going in the cloud, like a pay-as-you-go model with Azure."
"The most valuable features of Cassandra are the NoSQL database, high performance, and zero-copy streaming."
"Based on my experience, Cassandra is good for document management system, as well as distributed database system, and the automatic recovery process is there."
"The time series data was one of the best features along with auto publishing."
"Can achieve continuous data without a single downtime because of node to node ring architecture."
"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
 

Cons

"Maybe they can improve their performance in data fetching from a high volume of data sets."
"The solution is limited to a linear performance."
"The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved."
"The solution is not easy to use because it is a big database and you have to learn the interface. This is the case though in most of these solutions."
"Doesn't support a solution that can give aggregation."
"I want Cassandra to update its open-source version more quickly. It's already feature-rich, but I'd appreciate better integration with other NoSQL databases like MariaDB or MongoDB. If I ever need to work with customers or vendors using different NoSQL databases, having native integration in Cassandra would make managing and interacting with their databases much easier."
"Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem."
"It can be difficult to analyze what's going on inside of the database relative to other databases. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot sometimes."
"One of the drawbacks of Faiss is that it works only in-memory. If it could provide separate persistent storage without relying on in-memory, it would reduce the overhead."
"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay for a license."
"I use the tool's open-source version."
"There are licensing fees that must be paid, but I'm not sure if they are paid monthly or yearly."
"I don't have the specific numbers on pricing, but it was fairly priced."
"Cassandra is a free open source solution, but there is a commercial version available called DataStax Enterprise."
"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cassandra?
The use of Cassandra in real-time data analytics has been pivotal for our e-commerce platform. As our platform operates 24/7, providing services to sellers and customers alike, the need for real-ti...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cassandra?
The pricing for Cassandra is a little bit high, so it would be better for our community services if they consider community pricing for any non-profit organization like an NGO or other things. It w...
What needs improvement with Cassandra?
Regarding areas of improvement for Cassandra, currently, we are not facing significant issues. Some issues arise from our vendors like Apache slowness and distribution or load balancing from HAProx...
What do you like most about Faiss?
I used Faiss as a basic database.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Faiss?
I did not purchase FAISS through the AWS Marketplace because FAISS is an open-source product. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is straightforward, as there is no cost for acqui...
What needs improvement with Faiss?
I currently do not think there is anything to be improved based on our experience, as Faiss performs as we expected for our workflow. I would like to see improvement in the fact that FAISS currentl...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Cassandra vs. Faiss and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.