Cassandra vs Couchbase Enterprise vs ScyllaDB comparison

Read 12 ScyllaDB reviews

1,964 Views
1,944 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Cassandra

Couchbase Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cassandra, Couchbase Enterprise, 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).

Download the complete report

NoSQL Databases

September 2025

Helped 869,832 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:

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 8.7%, down from 13.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Couchbase Enterprise is 8.5%, down from 12.2% 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%
Couchbase Enterprise	8.5%
Cassandra	8.7%
Other	73.9%

NoSQL Databases

Featured Reviews

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.

Read full review

Ravi_Singh

Manager at Tesco

Supports multiple data models and offers AI capabilities

With some of the operations, we used to face some challenges with scalability. Although it worked pretty well, in some scenarios, we noticed issues where the replications and the sharding were not happening correctly. In recent versions, we also faced some issues in terms of enabling advanced operations like FTS and vectors. Although it works pretty well, in some places, we do face challenges, especially on a heavy scale. I think all issues are being addressed in the latest version of Couchbase. The resources are not that good for Couchbase. The tool's documentation is pretty extensive, but if you go for any kind of courses or tutorials, there are very limited resources available. It also becomes a little bit challenging for new people to get onboard into it. MongoDB and other such open-source database tools perform really well as they're really widely adopted, and they have resources available to get you onboarded pretty quickly. I think that we do face some challenges with Couchbase, but luckily, we have the tool's enterprise version solution, so we get all the support from the product team.

Read full review

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.

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

"The time series data was one of the best features along with auto publishing."

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

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

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

"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."

"We can add almost one million columns to the solution."

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

More Cassandra pros

"The most valuable features are the ease of application and the merging of data."

"Couchbase was a stable solution for us."

"Investing in Couchbase has significantly lowered our operational costs and increased throughput, reducing costs by half and supporting around five times the non-peak user volume during peak hours."

"The main advantages were associated with it being a no SQL database. It helped us send out metrics or rewards to multiple players in our game at a very low latency."

"It can scale horizontally, and we are looking to expand our capacity."

"Couchbase has not given any performance problems as of now."

"The valuable features of Couchbase are the many documents and index types, and they made a lot of features available enabling us to use it as a complete solution for our needs."

"It is pretty stable."

More Couchbase Enterprise pros

"ScyllaDB is fast and reliable. It has good performance."

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

"The performance aspects of Scylla are good, as always... A good point about Scylla is that it can be used extensively."

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

"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 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."

"The documentation is good. It integrates easily with our existing data infrastructure."

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

More ScyllaDB pros

Cons

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

"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."

"The disc space is lacking. You need to free it up as you are working."

"The solution is limited to a linear performance."

"Interface is not user friendly."

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

"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."

More Cassandra cons

"Couchbase could improve the design of the UI because it should be optimized for viewing statistics or a similar feature."

"There are some limitations to the database. The SQL database cannot handle real-time processing for critical IoT scenarios. What we have to do is store our data into the database then code it out, this wastes a lot of time."

"What is missing is that they have a new version, Couchbase Mobile three, but they haven't really updated or provided help or documentation about what needs to change to update to the latest mobile version."

"The main problem has been with integration with the services."

"The performance could be quicker and better, especially in the querying process."

"It is very difficult to load the backup of the older version to the newer version."

"The failover and failback could be a bit easier. When I looked at it last time, it had to be manually done. It also took over an hour for us to rebalance all the nodes."

"The scripting language for this solution could be improved. A big selling point is that they're like SQL server but there is still quite a lot of missing functionality."

More Couchbase Enterprise cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Some of the regular commands in NoSQL do not work."

More ScyllaDB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

"The licensing cost of Couchbase is quite expensive compared to other databases."

"It seems very reasonable. It's a lot cheaper than Redis, but we've got an enterprise license. So, it's about normal. It's not outrageous in price as far as we've seen. From Couchbase, there's no additional fee as far as I'm aware, but when you're integrating, there's an additional fee because a lot of times, they don't have an integration stack."

"It can range between 25,000 to 40,000 Euros per year depending on company requirements."

"We estimate that it's not very expensive, however, the pricing that you can get from the account managers, e.g. the public pricing, could be a bit expensive."

"I would rate this solution a nine out of ten for pricing as it is affordable."

"I wouldn't say Couchbase offers good value for money."

"The price of this solution is better than some of the other competitors."

"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."

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

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

"It's free."

"It's a bit expensive."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NoSQL Databases solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

869,832 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	7

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

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 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 needs improvement with Couchbase?

The main issue we keep facing from the past couple of years, observing other teams using Couchbase, is that whenever ...

What is your primary use case for Couchbase?

Basically we have clusters, Couchbase clusters, databases, and that is how we use Couchbase with XDCR. All the cluste...

What advice do you have for others considering Couchbase?

It is a good solution, but as every product needs improvement, this also needs some enhancement. It is a good product...

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 Cassandra

Comparisons

Compared 16% of the time

ClickHouse vs Cassandra

Compared 14% of the time

InfluxDB vs Cassandra

Compared 7% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs Cassandra

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle NoSQL vs Cassandra

Compared 4% of the time

More Cassandra Competitors

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Couchbase Enterprise

Compared 25% of the time

Redis vs Couchbase Enterprise

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Couchbase Enterprise

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Couchbase Enterprise

Compared 7% of the time

Google Cloud Firestore vs Couchbase Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

More Couchbase Enterprise Competitors

Redis vs ScyllaDB

Compared 20% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs ScyllaDB

Compared 13% of the time

Aerospike Database 7 vs ScyllaDB

Compared 11% of the time

Apache HBase vs ScyllaDB

Compared 9% of the time

InfluxDB vs ScyllaDB

Compared 7% of the time

More ScyllaDB Competitors

Product Reports

Download Cassandra product report

Cassandra

October 2025

Download Couchbase Enterprise product report

Couchbase Enterprise

October 2025

Download ScyllaDB product report

September 2025

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

Couchbase Enterprise offers powerful data management capabilities with features like horizontal scalability, ease of use, and flexible tools for business applications. Designed for high performance and reliability, it supports multi-master capability and low latency, making it ideal for dynamic environments.

Designed for businesses needing crucial data management, Couchbase Enterprise offers advanced indexing, analytics engines, and efficient storage for performance enhancement. It provides flexibility with data types, robust data sync, and supports a dynamic API for seamless integration. Its intuitive query language simplifies operations, ensuring businesses navigate effortlessly while enjoying high availability and extensive features. Despite this, challenges exist in areas like manual failover processes, complex upgrades, and UI limitations, necessitating enhancements in concurrency, integration, and security features. Performance issues on certain platforms add to the need for improved documentation and support.

What are Couchbase Enterprise’s most important features?

Horizontal Scalability: Allows easy scaling across different servers to handle large data volumes.
Advanced Analytics Engine: Drives insightful business decisions by processing complex data rapidly.
Efficient Data Storage: Enhances system performance by optimizing data organization and retrieval.
Multi-Master Capability: Ensures data consistency and reliability across several nodes.
Dynamic API Integration: Facilitates seamless integration with other applications for extended functionality.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Performance Efficiency: Low latency capabilities ensure smooth operations for business applications.
High Availability: Robust infrastructure supports uninterrupted service and minimal downtime.
Data Flexibility: Supports diverse data types, enhancing adaptability to business needs.
Real-Time Data Replication: Ensures timely data updates across multiple platforms, enhancing workflow.
Reliable Customer Support: Provides technical assistance, improving user experience and system utilization.

Couchbase Enterprise is deployed across industries for its excellent data handling capabilities. It empowers telemedicine, e-commerce, gaming, and telecommunications sectors by offering efficient data link utilization, caching, and logging. Some companies leverage its real-time data replication with Elasticsearch for high-performance operational needs, while others benefit from its capabilities in managing reads and writes in iGaming. Retail industries use its document-based storage for structured inventory management, and cloud migrations are simplified with support from Capella.

Couchbase

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.