Apache HBase vs Cassandra vs ScyllaDB comparison

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Apache HBase

Cassandra

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apache HBase, Cassandra, and ScyllaDB based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about MongoDB, Microsoft, ScyllaDB and others in NoSQL Databases.

To learn more, read our detailed NoSQL Databases Report (Updated: September 2025).

NoSQL Databases

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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:

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Apache HBase is 5.3%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cassandra is 8.7%, down from 13.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ScyllaDB is 8.9%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NoSQL Databases Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ScyllaDB	8.9%
Cassandra	8.7%
Apache HBase	5.3%
Other	77.1%

NoSQL Databases

Featured Reviews

Ephrem Sisay

DevOps Engineer (M-PESA) at Safaricom Ethiopia plc

In-memory processing and integration capabilities have optimized query performance

Apache HBase could be improved by optimizing the integration with Apache Phoenix; sometimes the abstraction and lookup jobs lead to issues when there are too many requests. Resource optimization isn't always as successful as it should be, which can cause some query and lookup jobs to fail. For instance, during eligibility checks for credit, if there are many requests on the database, it might fail, and after such a failure, it doesn't allow us to run queries from the moment they stop. If there could be optimization to require less resource usage and allow those jobs and queries to pick up from where they stopped, that would be a great addition to the tool.

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Himanshu Amodwala

Senior cloud solution architect at Microsoft

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.

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Manikandan Gunasekaran

Director of Engineering at Ola

Reliable data management with great reliability and performance

From a sales pitch standpoint, it needs to deliver on promises of better ROI and compaction. Additionally, ticketing and support systems could be improved due to the time it takes to get answers. There's also an issue with compatibility when attempting to switch back from the enterprise to the community version.

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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 in-memory processing lets us optimize our queries and helps us run concurrent queries and other jobs such as the lookup jobs we always use Apache HBase for."

"Apache HBase is a database used for data storage."

"The most valuable part is the column family structure."

"The best features of Apache HBase include being embedded, making it very fast; when it's linking, it operates with virtually no delay, and all of the queries are very fast too due to some internal optimization which makes it very sufficient and efficient."

"The in-memory processing lets us optimize our queries and helps us run concurrent queries and other jobs such as the lookup jobs we always use Apache HBase for."

"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."

"The solution's database capabilities are very good."

"A consistent solution."

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

"The most valuable features of Cassandra are the NoSQL database, high performance, and zero-copy streaming."

"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."

"Some of the valued features of this solution are it has good performance and failover."

"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."

More Cassandra pros

"ScyllaDB is very fast, and I can use it for so many things."

"The best features of ScyllaDB are how it synchronizes data and its failover system. There's a unique formula to decide the number of nodes you need and the minimum required, which I find helpful. It also offers encryption and supports APIs, making it great for distributed systems and scaling databases across different regions. While it's easy to use, having prior experience helps configure it properly. There are many configurations; if you don't understand them, you might mess up the design. So, understanding your system's needs, like whether it requires more read or write operations, is crucial for setting up the correct configuration."

"It is lightweight, and it requires less infrastructure."

"I like how fast it is to query data from the ScyllaDB node!"

"The database is easy to use, fast, and accessible for applications because the API is straightforward."

"The product's most valuable features are efficiency and reliability."

"ScyllaDB allows fine-tuning of the table structure. Speed is probably the most critical factor because we perform a lot of heavy data ingestion. One of its core features is its ability to handle high volumes and maintain speed when accessing data. Additionally, high availability and partitioning are built-in features of ScyllaDB."

"The performance and scalability are good, and we hardly see any major issues with ScyllaDB."

More ScyllaDB pros

Cons

"The setup of Apache HBase needs a lot of time, and the linkage is not the program itself, but the activation and connecting to the NYPD engine always takes considerable time."

"I don't like using Apache HBase to store huge amounts of data because of many performance issues."

"We've seen performance issues."

"Apache HBase could be improved by optimizing the integration with Apache Phoenix; sometimes the abstraction and lookup jobs lead to issues when there are too many requests."

"Batching bulk data can cause performance issues."

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

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

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

"The initial setup of Cassandra can be difficult in the configuration. There might be a need to have assistance. The implementation process can six months for connecting to certain databases."

"The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved."

"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."

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

More Cassandra cons

"If you don't have the best computing resources, then it's not easy to set up. In such cases, we have to run ScyllaDB in developer mode."

"It seems we have better options available. So probably don't go for ScyllaDB. The reason is, first, it's very high. It's not as straightforward as, like, Postgres or ClickHouse to set up. It requires a complex setup."

"Data export, along with how we can purchase the data periodically, needs to be improved so that the storage is within control. Then, we could optimize it even better."

"We faced several challenges while integrating ScyllaDB into our AWS environment. One common issue was that a security port wasn’t opened on one node, preventingdata synchronization across clusters. We noticed the data wasn’t syncing correctly when we saw different record counts in other regions. After investigating, we found that the port was closed in one AWS region. Once we opened the port, the data synchronization across all nodes resumed as expected."

"The documentation is not well established for new developers."

"The product needs to add more features and improve the response time of the support team."

"From a sales pitch standpoint, it needs to deliver on promises of better ROI and compaction."

"The documentation of Scylla is an area with shortcomings and needs to be improved."

More ScyllaDB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

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

"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."

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

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

"It's a bit expensive."

"The paid version of ScyllaDB is not that expensive. The main advantage of the paid version is direct support from the ScyllaDB team, which can resolve issues faster—typically within a day, compared to two to three days with the free version. The paid version also offers better guidance and support, while the free version has good documentation and is more high-level. I’d rate their support team nine out of ten because of the quick responses from their community."

"It is an expensive tool compared to its competitor."

"It's free."

"I believe that there is a yearly licensing cost and that it's expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

University

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	13

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache HBase?

Apache HBase is a database used for data storage.

What needs improvement with Apache HBase?

Apache HBase could be improved by optimizing the integration with Apache Phoenix; sometimes the abstraction and looku...

What advice do you have for others considering Apache HBase?

I'm working for a corporate that uses Apache HBase for their Big Data platform and I'm a Big Data engineer there. We'...

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 operat...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cassandra?

We are using Cassandra locally and as open-source.

What needs improvement with Cassandra?

While Cassandra can handle NoSQL, I think there should be more flexibility for whole schema design when data is store...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Scylla?

The enterprise version comes with a cost of about $300,000 per year, however, we did not experience the promised comp...

What needs improvement with Scylla?

From a sales pitch standpoint, it needs to deliver on promises of better ROI and compaction. Additionally, ticketing ...

What is your primary use case for Scylla?

We dump a lot of our data, such as every entry created with respect to when a user rides a scooter, every record gets...

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Apache HBase

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

InfluxDB vs Cassandra

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Cassandra

Compared 3% of the time

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Redis vs ScyllaDB

Compared 21% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs ScyllaDB

Compared 13% of the time

Couchbase Enterprise vs ScyllaDB

Compared 12% of the time

Aerospike Database 7 vs ScyllaDB

Compared 11% of the time

InfluxDB vs ScyllaDB

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

NoSQL Databases

Download Apache HBase product report

Cassandra

Download Cassandra product report

Download ScyllaDB product report

Also Known As

HBase

No data available

Overview

Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's BigTable. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, Apache HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop and HDFS.

Apache

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

ScyllaDB is an open-source, distributed NoSQL wide-column datastore (a highly scalable NoSQL database), known for its compatibility with Apache Cassandra, and for supporting the same protocols as Cassandra (CQL and Thrift) and the same file formats (SSTable). ScyllaDB is designed for high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for data-intensive applications. Its architecture allows it to deliver remarkable performance on a massive scale, utilizing modern multi-core servers to their fullest potential

ScyllaDB utilizes a similar architecture, data format, and query language as Apache Cassandra, providing compatibility while dramatically improving speed and scalability.

The key advantages of ScyllaDB include its rewritten C++ implementation that eliminates Cassandra's expensive Java garbage collection pauses, built-in caching for fast access to frequently used data, and shard-aware drivers for direct routing of requests. This enables it to fully leverage modern multi-core servers for massive parallelism. The community is active and the latest major release, ScyllaDB Enterprise 2023.1.0 LTS, incorporates over 5,000 code commits focused on enhancing capabilities.

ScyllaDB supports wide-column data modeling for fast read performance at scale. It includes integrated monitoring and management tools to track database health and performance. For organizations looking to boost speed and reduce costs for NoSQL workloads, ScyllaDB offers a drop-in replacement for Cassandra that delivers lower latency, higher throughput, and increased scalability with fewer nodes. Its seamless migration path makes switching from Cassandra seamless, requiring minimal code changes.