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Cassandra vs Elastic Search 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)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Search as a Service (1st)
 

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 Elastic Search is 4.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search4.0%
Cassandra2.3%
Other93.7%
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.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"Cassandra offers high availability and fault tolerance, making it suitable for large-scale data storage and real-time processing."
"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."
"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."
"Can achieve continuous data without a single downtime because of node to node ring architecture."
"Its retrieval is similar to an RDBMS, so our team finds it easy to adapt."
"The most valuable feature of Cassandra is its fast retrieval. Additionally, the solution can handle large amounts of data. It is the quickest application we use."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
"I would recommend Elastic Search to other people who want to have fast search in their applications."
"I like how it allows us to connect to Kafka and get this data in a document format very easily. Elasticsearch is very fast when you do text-based searches of documents. That area is very good, and the search is very good."
"Elastic Search is the perfect tool for scalability."
"A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data."
"From the customer side, Elastic Search is super fast and very efficient, delivering results quickly."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
 

Cons

"There could be more integration, and it could be more user-friendly."
"While Cassandra can handle NoSQL, I think there should be more flexibility for whole schema design when data is stored in wide columns. Additionally, I believe that eventual consistency should be enhanced."
"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."
"Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem."
"Cassandra could be more user-friendly like MongoDB."
"The solution is limited to a linear performance."
"The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved."
"While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search."
"I have not explored Elastic Search at the most. Searching from vector DB is available in Elastic Search, and there is one more concept of graph searching or graph database searching. I have not explored it, but if it is not there, that would be an improvement area where Elastic Search can improve."
"The one area that can use improvement is the automapping of fields."
"The documentation regarding customization could be better."
"Elastic Search needs to improve its technical support. It should be customer-friendly and have good support."
"I think the pricing of Elastic Search is really, really expensive."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
"They're making changes in their architecture too frequently."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"There are licensing fees that must be paid, but I'm not sure if they are paid monthly or yearly."
"I use the tool's open-source version."
"We pay for a license."
"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 free open-sourced version of this solution."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"The premium license is expensive."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"The solution is affordable."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

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 ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

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
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cassandra vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.