Cassandra vs Milvus comparison

Apache and The Milvus Project are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. Apache is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.6, while The Milvus Project is ranked #14. Apache holds a 3.9% mindshare in VD, compared to The Milvus Project’s 7.0% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of The Milvus Project users who would recommend it.

Cassandra

Read 25 Cassandra reviews

4,616 Views
1,985 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Milvus

Read 5 Milvus reviews

4,595 Views
3,768 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cassandra

Milvus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Cassandra and Milvus are competing in the data management category. Cassandra has the upper hand in handling traditional database solutions, while Milvus leads in AI and vector data management.

Features: Cassandra offers robust data storage, exceptional scalability, and high availability, making it ideal for transactional workloads. Milvus provides high-performance querying for vector data, scalability for machine learning applications, and integration with AI frameworks.

Room for Improvement: Cassandra could improve ease of use for non-technical users and expand its support for AI and machine learning integrations. Its architectural complexity can be challenging for new adopters. Milvus, on the other hand, could enhance its documentation to provide more clarity, improve cross-compatibility with various AI frameworks, and optimize resource utilization for on-premise deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cassandra is well-suited for traditional IT environments with robust documentation and community support. Milvus simplifies deployment through containerization, enhancing scalability and resource management, and provides specialized AI support.

Pricing and ROI: Cassandra's open-source model is cost-effective, with long-term ROI from its scalability and reliability. Milvus, also open-source, requires additional investments for AI-specific purposes, impacting initial costs but providing significant ROI potential through rapid AI insights.

To learn more, read our detailed Cassandra vs. Milvus Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cassandra vs. Milvus

June 2026

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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

Ranking in other categories

NoSQL Databases (5th)

Milvus

Ranking in Vector Databases

14th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (14th)

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 Milvus is 7.0%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cassandra	3.9%
Milvus	7.0%
Other	89.1%

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

Monirul Islam Khan

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.

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Sameer Bhangale

Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly

Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cassandra offers high availability and fault tolerance, making it suitable for large-scale data storage and real-time processing."

"The solution provided us with more than 100K PNRs a second and because the company was international there was a heavy data write, and at the same time a heavy data read."

"A consistent solution."

"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."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its speed and distributed nature."

"The most valuable features of Cassandra are its scaling capabilities and its non-SQL nature capabilities."

"The technical evaluation is very good."

"Setup was very straightforward."

More Cassandra pros

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."

"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."

"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."

"I like the accuracy and usability."

"Milvus offers multiple methods for calculating similarities or distances between vectors, such as L2 norm and cosine similarity. These methods help in comparing different vectors based on specific use cases. For instance, in our use case, we find that the L2 distance works best, but you can experiment with different methods to find the most suitable one for your needs."

Cons

"Fine-tuning was a bit of a challenge."

"Row-level locking is not available; might be very helpful in update use cases."

"There could be more integration, and it could be more user-friendly."

"The interface could definitely be improved. It's a technical database and for me the features are not user friendly."

"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."

"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."

"One of the issues with the solution is that you cannot drop write like you're able to in MongoDB and MySQL, where you can join tables."

"If you have a requirement of aggregation and joints, Cassandra doesn't support a solution that can give the aggregation."

More Cassandra cons

"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."

"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."

"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."

"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay for a license."

"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."

"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."

"Cassandra is a free open source solution, but there is a commercial version available called DataStax Enterprise."

"I don't have the specific numbers on pricing, but it was fairly priced."

"Milvus is an open-source solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

Performing Arts

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	14

No data available

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...

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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...

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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 ...

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What needs improvement with Milvus?

Milvus could be improved how it could automatically generate insights from the data it holds. Milvus maintains embedding information and knows the relationships between data points. It would be use...

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What is your primary use case for Milvus?

Milvus is primarily used in RAG, which involves retrieving relevant documents or data to augment the generation of new content. Milvus helps convert text and other data into a vector space, and the...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Milvus?

Milvus works well for various use cases and is quite flexible in terms of deployment. For on-premises deployment, you can use the open-source version with Docker. The system requirements are relati...

See all answers

Comparisons

ClickHouse vs Cassandra

Compared 7% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Cassandra

Compared 7% of the time

DataStax Enterprise vs Cassandra

Compared 6% of the time

ScyllaDB vs Cassandra

Compared 5% of the time

Apache HBase vs Cassandra

Compared 3% of the time

More Cassandra Competitors

Elastic Search vs Milvus

Compared 11% of the time

PostgreSQL vs Milvus

Compared 9% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Milvus

Compared 7% of the time

LanceDB vs Milvus

Compared 7% of the time

More Milvus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cassandra

August 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Open Source Databases

July 2026

Download Milvus product report

Overview

Cassandra is a distributed and scalable database management system used for real-time data processing.

It is highly valued for its ability to handle large amounts of data, scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and flexible data model.

It is commonly used in finance, e-commerce, and social media industries.

Apache

Milvus is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving large-scale vectors or embeddings. It is widely used in applications such as similarity search, recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing.

With its fast and accurate search capabilities, scalability, and support for multiple programming languages, Milvus is suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Users appreciate its efficient search capabilities, ability to handle large-scale data, support for various data types, and user-friendly interface.

Milvus enables easy retrieval of information from vast datasets, regardless of the data format, and is praised for its high performance and scalability. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface is also highlighted as a valuable aspect of the platform.

The Milvus Project

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

1. Alibaba Group 2. Tencent 3. Baidu 4. JD.com 5. Meituan 6. Xiaomi 7. Didi Chuxing 8. ByteDance 9. Huawei 10. ZTE 11. Lenovo 12. Haier 13. China Mobile 14. China Telecom 15. China Unicom 16. Ping An Insurance 17. China Life Insurance 18. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 19. Bank of China 20. Agricultural Bank of China 21. China Construction Bank 22. PetroChina 23. Sinopec 24. China National Offshore Oil Corporation 25. China Southern Airlines 26. Air China 27. China Eastern Airlines 28. China Railway Group 29. China Railway Construction Corporation 30. China Communications Construction Company 31. China Merchants Group 32. China Evergrande Group

Buyer's Guide

Cassandra vs. Milvus

June 2026

Free Report: Cassandra vs. Milvus

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