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Cassandra vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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 NoSQL Databases
4th
Ranking in Vector Databases
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in NoSQL Databases
3rd
Ranking in Vector Databases
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 10.8%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 2.9%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Himanshu Amodwala - PeerSpot reviewer
Well-equipped to handle a massive influx of data and billions of requests
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-time updates is paramount. For instance, when a customer leaves comments or feedback on an image, they anticipate an immediate reflection of these changes on the portal. Similarly, sellers altering product attributes or updating images expect instant visibility of these modifications. Handling large data volumes with Cassandra has been an excellent experience. Despite challenges related to the influx, these were not attributed to Cassandra itself but rather to middle-layer issues. Generally, it demonstrated scalability with workloads, thanks to its horizontal scaling capabilities. We could easily add new nodes to the system as needed, ensuring the platform coped well with increasing loads. The tool's most beneficial feature for scalability is its entire architecture. The absence of a single point of failure or a leader within the ecosystem contributes to its robust scalability. This key aspect influenced our decision to opt for the Cassandra ecosystem. In terms of performance, it demonstrated the ability to handle approximately 1.6 billion requests per day. This was achieved on AWS using EC2 instances, and it was during a period about four to five years ago.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Very efficient for application-facing scenarios
There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cassandra has some features that are more useful for specific use cases where you have time series where you have huge amounts of writes. That should be quick, but not specifically the reads. We needed to have quicker reads and writes and this is why we are using Cassandra right now."
"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 its scaling capabilities and its non-SQL nature capabilities."
"Cassandra is good. It's better than CouchDB, and we are using it in parallel with CouchDB. Cassandra looks better and is more user-friendly."
"Our primary use case for the solution is testing."
"A consistent solution."
"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-time updates is paramount."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Cosmos DB is its scalability. That is the biggest reason I use Azure Cosmos DB."
"The solution is easy to use, and it is also easy to integrate with several things for database use cases."
"Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB."
"What I appreciate most are the latency and the access, which are guaranteed by the tool, which is really impressive."
"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."
"We love the ability to land data with Cosmos DB easily. Cosmos is native to Azure, so everything works seamlessly with it. You need good data to have good AI, and Cosmos makes it easy to land the data."
"I like the scalability. There aren't any constraints for posting in the geolocation. I also like the SQL architecture."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB simplifies the process of saving and retrieving data."
 

Cons

"Doesn't support a solution that can give aggregation."
"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."
"Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem."
"The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved."
"Maybe they can improve their performance in data fetching from a high volume of data sets."
"Depending upon our schema, we can't make ORDER BY or GROUP BY clauses in the product."
"Fine-tuning was a bit of a challenge."
"We experience configuration issues when accommodating the volumes we require, which often necessitates consultation with the Cassandra development team."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model is complicated, which people don't understand."
"Because there is no local way of doing things, Azure Cosmos DB will always be considered expensive."
"I have to say technical support is not very good as it takes too long. Sometimes it can take them two or three days to respond to your ticket."
"A limitation in Azure Cosmos DB is the 2 MB document size. Developers need more systemic support in chaining multiple documents if more than 2 MB is required."
"We should have more freedom to tweak it and make our own queries for non-traditional use-cases."
"An improvement would be a more robust functionality around updating elements on a document, or some type of procedural updates that don't require pulling the entire document."
"A couple features that would help me in architectural solutions would be customizable architecture or customizable documentation, which both Microsoft Azure or Microsoft Teams can provide."
"It's still new, and good training resources are harder to find. Even the most recent books on Cosmos DB are several years old, which is ancient in IT terms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"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."
"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."
"We pay for a license."
"With heavy use, like a large-scale IoT implementation, you could easily hit a quarter of a million dollars a month in Azure charges if Cosmos DB is a big part of it."
"Pricing is one of the solution's main features because it is based on usage, scales automatically, and is not too costly."
"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."
"From a startup point of view, it appears to be expensive. If I were to create my startup, it would not have the pricing appeal compared to the competition, such as Supabase. All those other databases are well-advertised by communities. I know there is a free tier with Azure Cosmos DB. It is just not well advertised."
"Its price is very good for the basic stuff. When you go to a more complicated use case, especially when you need replication and availability zones, it gets a little costly."
"Right now, I have opted for the student subscription plan, for which Microsoft charges me around 100 USD. The pricing of the solution depends on the solution's usage."
"Our experience with the pricing and setup cost is that it aligns with what we expect based on the pricing we see. However, I would absolutely like it to be less if possible."
"Cosmos should be cheaper. We actually intend to stop using it in the near future because the price is too high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
5%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Legal Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 needs improvement with Cassandra?
Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem. About a year ago, we were unable to recover data without help from a senior Dev...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption. C...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I had a challenging experience implementing the emulator with a Mac. I had to install the emulator in a Docker container because it is not natively compatible. A significant amount of time was spen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Apple 2. Netflix 3. Facebook 4. Instagram 5. Twitter 6. eBay 7. Spotify 8. Uber 9. Airbnb 10. Adobe 11. Cisco 12. IBM 13. Microsoft 14. Yahoo 15. Reddit 16. Pinterest 17. Salesforce 18. LinkedIn 19. Hulu 20. Airbnb 21. Walmart 22. Target 23. Sony 24. Intel 25. Cisco 26. HP 27. Oracle 28. SAP 29. GE 30. Siemens 31. Volkswagen 32. Toyota
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.