Cassandra vs PostgreSQL comparison

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Cassandra

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

PostgreSQL and Cassandra both operate in the database management category. While PostgreSQL is suitable for structured data with its comprehensive features, Cassandra has the advantage in handling large-scale data quickly and reliably.

Features: PostgreSQL provides ACID compliance, geospatial support, and robust data types like JSONB, making it a versatile platform for various applications. On the other hand, Cassandra offers high availability and fault tolerance, ideal for distributed systems, and excels in managing large volumes of time-series data with exceptional speed.

Room for Improvement: PostgreSQL could improve its user-friendliness by enhancing installation tools and performance monitoring. It also needs better support for large-scale deployments and advanced analytics. Cassandra could benefit from improved handling of complex queries, particularly those involving JOIN operations, and integrating more user-friendly interfaces could broaden its usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PostgreSQL shows flexibility in hybrid, private cloud, and on-premises environments, supported by a robust community and third-party services. Cassandra also offers diverse deployment options, excelling in cloud environments. Both rely on community-driven assistance, but PostgreSQL's tighter integration with hosting platforms gives it a slight edge.

Pricing and ROI: PostgreSQL is a cost-effective solution due to its open-source nature, offering significant savings compared to proprietary databases. Cassandra is available in a free edition, but enterprise-level features may incur additional costs if commercial support is needed through vendors like DataStax, which can be justifiable for large-scale demands.

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

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Cassandra vs. PostgreSQL

September 2026

Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

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

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NoSQL Databases (5th)

PostgreSQL

Ranking in Vector Databases

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

128

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 4.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 8.7%, up from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
PostgreSQL	8.7%
Cassandra	4.0%
Other	87.3%

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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Shobhit Goel

Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency

The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"The technical evaluation is very good."

"I am getting much better performance than relational databases."

"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."

"Overall, I would rate Cassandra as nine because of its fast writes, which really suit our use cases mostly."

"Its retrieval is similar to an RDBMS, so our team finds it easy to adapt."

"It's used as our cloud based backend store as a temporary cache and for storing data that streams through our data pipe."

"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."

More Cassandra pros

"PostgreSQL syntax is much clearer and consistent, and its stored procedures are powerful and fast."

"I recommend PostgreSQL without doubt because my experience of almost 20 years with this product has shown me that PostgreSQL has certain features that make it highly reliable: high scalability, robustness, available for multiple platforms, extensible with little effort and without additional cost, designed for high volume environments, easy to manage and extensive online support."

"One of the most valuable features is real-time data capture; it optimizes database performance. I think using real-time data capture reduces job running time and the amount of data sent at once with batch loads."

"Its installation is very easy and quick, and it is free."

"The solution is stable; there are no bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, it's reliable, and the performance is excellent."

"The community support and the open-source community for it are good."

"The solution is very easy to use; you don't have to be extremely knowledgeable or technical to take advantage of it, and the product is quite flexible while being one of the cheapest options on the market."

"If you have PostgreSQL expertise you can run your business off PostgreSQL."

Cons

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

"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."

"We experience configuration issues when accommodating the volumes we require, which often necessitates consultation with the Cassandra development team."

"The solution doesn't have joins between tables so you need other tools for that."

"Depending upon our schema, we can't make ORDER BY or GROUP BY clauses in the product."

"Maybe they can improve their performance in data fetching from a high volume of data sets."

"Cassandra could be more user-friendly like MongoDB."

"There were challenges with the query language and the development interface. The query language, in particular, could be improved for better optimization. These challenges were encountered while using the Java SDK."

More Cassandra cons

"PostgreSQL is pretty slow when dealing with queries like COUNT(*) and many of the queries like 'INSERT IGNORE', which inserts if a row doesn't exist, and 'REPLACE' which replaces the current row."

"Better SELECT performance is something that PostgreSQL could really benefit from."

"Authentication config could be made easier."

"I would love to have primary keys on views. This function missing has made PostgreSQL harder than need be with Microsoft Access as a front end."

"The only thing I would really want/need to improve is pgAdmin3."

"In future releases I would like to see built-in realization of multi-master cluster with sharding, effective partitioning, incremental backup, optimizations for SSD, connection pool facilities, and built-in replication for tables and databases."

"It is missing some key scalability features such as sharding and automatic failover, but the Postgres developers are working on adding these features."

"Although there's documentation out there, it needs even better documentation."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"I use the tool's open-source version."

"It is free. There is no license on it."

"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."

"The licensing model is good."

"There is an annual license."

"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."

"It is open source. There is no licensing."

"It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it."

"The community version of Postgre is basically free."

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	59
Midsize Enterprise	26
Large Enterprise	49

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 ...

How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?

I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...

What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?

While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...

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Product Reports

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Cassandra

October 2026

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October 2026

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

PostgreSQL is a versatile and reliable database management system commonly used for web development, data analysis, and building scalable databases.

It offers advanced features like indexing, replication, and transaction management. Users appreciate its flexibility, performance, and ability to handle large amounts of data efficiently. Its robustness, scalability, and support for complex queries make it highly valuable.

Additionally, PostgreSQL's extensibility, flexibility, community support, and frequent updates contribute to its ongoing improvement and stability.

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. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg