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Cassandra vs Faiss 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
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (6th)
Faiss
Ranking in Vector Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Faiss is 5.6%, down from 14.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Faiss5.6%
Cassandra1.9%
Other92.5%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Himanshu Amodwala - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Kalindu Sekarage - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration improves accuracy and supports token-level embedding
The best features FAISS offers for my team include seamless integration with Colbert and the ability to use FAISS via the Ragatouille framework, which is tailor-made for using the Colbert model. Feature-wise, FAISS allows for more accurate result retrieval, and retrieval speed is also good when comparing the index size. Regarding features, I also emphasize that the usability of FAISS is very seamless, particularly its integration with Colbert and Ragatouille. FAISS has positively impacted my organization by helping us increase the accuracy of retrieval documents; when we store documents in token-level embedding, the accuracy will be high. Additionally, we do not need any external server to host FAISS, allowing us to integrate it with our backend framework, making it a very flexible framework.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am getting much better performance than relational databases."
"Can achieve continuous data without a single downtime because of node to node ring architecture."
"The most valuable features of Cassandra are its scaling capabilities and its non-SQL nature capabilities."
"Some of the valued features of this solution are it has good performance and failover."
"Overall, I would rate Cassandra as nine because of its fast writes, which really suit our use cases mostly."
"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."
"Cassandra is good. It's better than CouchDB, and we are using it in parallel with CouchDB. Cassandra looks better and is more user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of Cassandra are the NoSQL database, high performance, and zero-copy streaming."
"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
 

Cons

"Batching bulk data can cause performance issues."
"The disc space is lacking. You need to free it up as you are working."
"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."
"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."
"It can be difficult to analyze what's going on inside of the database relative to other databases. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot sometimes."
"Maybe they can improve their performance in data fetching from a high volume of data sets."
"One of the drawbacks of Faiss is that it works only in-memory. If it could provide separate persistent storage without relying on in-memory, it would reduce the overhead."
"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't have the specific numbers on pricing, but it was fairly priced."
"We pay for a license."
"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 use the tool's open-source version."
"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise13
No data available
 

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 operates 24/7, providing services to sellers and customers alike, the need for real-ti...
What needs improvement with Cassandra?
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 e...
What do you like most about Faiss?
I used Faiss as a basic database.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Faiss?
I did not purchase FAISS through the AWS Marketplace because FAISS is an open-source product. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is straightforward, as there is no cost for acqui...
What needs improvement with Faiss?
I currently do not think there is anything to be improved based on our experience, as Faiss performs as we expected for our workflow. I would like to see improvement in the fact that FAISS currentl...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Cassandra vs. Faiss and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.