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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
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (5th)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 3.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.1%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search5.1%
Cassandra3.9%
Other91.0%
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.
reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cassandra is good, it's better than CouchDB, and we are using it in parallel with CouchDB, as Cassandra looks better and is more user-friendly."
"We have experienced zero downtime using Cassandra, it is highly stable."
"We can add almost one million columns to the solution."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its speed and distributed nature."
"I am satisfied with the performance."
"Ability to achieve write speeds 10k tps: Compared to existing, it is 300% percent higher."
"I am satisfied with the performance; so far it has done fairly well and there haven't been any complaints."
"It's used as our cloud based backend store as a temporary cache and for storing data that streams through our data pipe."
"A positive feature of ELK is that it directly interacts with Elasticsearch, the UI is very nice, and performance wise it's quite good too."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"The product is scalable with good performance."
"It helps us to analyse the logs based on the location, user, and other log parameters."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"It is stable."
"The solution is very good with no issues or glitches."
"I am impressed with the product's Logstash. The tool is fast and customizable. You can build beautiful dashboards with it. It is useful and reliable."
 

Cons

"We experience configuration issues when accommodating the volumes we require, which often necessitates consultation with the Cassandra development team."
"Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem."
"Cassandra can improve by adding more built-in tools. For example, if you want to do some maintenance activities in the cluster, we have to depend on third-party tools. Having these tools build-in would be e benefit."
"Cassandra could be more user-friendly like MongoDB."
"The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved."
"The disc space is lacking. You need to free it up as you are working."
"If you have a requirement of aggregation and joints, Cassandra doesn't support a solution that can give the aggregation."
"Fine-tuning was a bit of a challenge."
"There should be more stability."
"From the UI point of view, we are using most probably Kibana, and I think they can do much better than that."
"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
"Apart from the good things, what I would like to see improved or enhanced in Elastic Search is the storage cost."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"I know many customers who lost their data and could not recover it."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's open-source version."
"We pay for a license."
"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"Cassandra is a free open source solution, but there is a commercial version available called DataStax Enterprise."
"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."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"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 pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"The version of Elastic Enterprise Search I am using is open source which is free. The pricing model should improve for the enterprise version because it is very expensive."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"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%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
8%
Performing Arts
5%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

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 is your primary use case for Cassandra?
My use case for Cassandra is for a document and other unstructured data management system as well as structured data for ultra-poor member community edition, community members' PII information, so ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
 

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: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.