Cassandra vs Pinecone comparison

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Cassandra

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Cassandra and Pinecone are competing products in the data management and distributed databases category. Pinecone seems to have the upper hand with its advanced feature set tailored for AI applications, while Cassandra is more cost-effective and easier to integrate.

Features: Cassandra offers scalability, high availability, and an open-source platform. Pinecone provides vector search capabilities, integration with machine learning applications, and supports real-time data processing.

Room for Improvement: Cassandra could improve by offering more AI-focused features and better integration with modern data analytics tools. Pinecone might enhance its offerings with more cost-effective solutions, broader documentation, and open-source availability to attract a wider user base.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cassandra offers straightforward deployment with extensive community support. Pinecone boasts a streamlined deployment process paired with dedicated customer service, enhancing user experience in complex AI setups.

Pricing and ROI: Cassandra is more affordable with lower setup costs and high ROI due to scalability and open-source structure. Pinecone, while having higher setup costs, justifies its investment through powerful search and AI functionalities that can improve ROI, balancing cost efficiency with feature richness.

To learn more, read our detailed Cassandra vs. Pinecone Report (Updated: December 2025).

Cassandra vs. Pinecone

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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

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NoSQL Databases (6th)

Pinecone

Ranking in Vector Databases

6th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Data Analysis (12th), AI Content Creation (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 2.1%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pinecone is 7.3%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pinecone	7.3%
Cassandra	2.1%
Other	90.6%

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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Pradeep Gudipati

Chief Technology Advisor at Kovaad technologies Pvt Ltd

Faced challenges with metadata filtering but have achieved reliable long-term memory for chat applications

We were looking at multiple options for a vector database, and we found Pinecone to be the easiest to integrate into our solution. Plus, it has a very generous free tier, which helps us as a startup. The best features Pinecone offers are quick setup and good indexing for us. The retrieval mechanisms are fast, and the integration with Python as with JavaScript and TypeScript libraries that Pinecone provides are very robust. Authentication is also very good. The namespaces feature allows us to break down or store data for each user separately, reducing interference and maintaining privacy as an important feature. Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database. We are seeing that the trainees getting trained on the platform are more satisfied with the results or messages generated by AI.

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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

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

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

"The most valuable features are the counter features and the NoSQL schema. It also has good scalability. You can scale Cassandra to any finite level."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cassandra pros

"Pinecone's integration with AWS was seamless."

"We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases."

"The semantic search capability is very good."

"The product's setup phase was easy."

"The best thing about Pinecone is its private local host feature. It displays all the maintenance parameters and lets us view the data sent to the database. We can also see the status of the CD and which application it corresponds to."

"The most valuable feature of Pinecone is its managed service aspect. There are many vector databases available, but Pinecone stands out in the market. It is very flexible, allowing us to input any kind of data dimensions into the platform. This makes it easy to use for both technical and non-technical users."

"Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database."

"Pinecone has positively impacted my organization by helping people in needle-in-a-haystack situations, as previously they had to grind through PDF documents, PowerPoint documents, and websites, but now with Pinecone, they can ask questions and receive references to documents along with the page numbers where that information exists, so they can use it as a reference or backtrack, especially for things such as FDA approvals where they can quote the exact page number from PDF documents, eliminating hallucination and providing real-time data that relies on an external vector database with enough guardrails to ensure it won't provide information not in the vector database, confining it to the information present in the indexes."

More Pinecone pros

Cons

"Cassandra can improve by adding more built-in tools. For example, if you want to do some maintenance activities in the cluster, we have to depend on third-party tools. Having these tools build-in would be e benefit."

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

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

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

"The solution is limited to a linear performance."

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

"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."

"Batching bulk data can cause performance issues."

More Cassandra cons

"One major issue I have noticed with Pinecone is that it does not allow me to search based on metadata."

"The tool does not confirm whether a file is deleted or not."

"Pinecone is good as it is, but had it been on AWS infrastructure, we wouldn't experience some network lags because it's outside AWS."

"Onboarding could be better and smoother."

"The product fails to offer a serverless type of storage capacity."

"If Pinecone gave us RAG as a service, we'd be more than happy to use that."

"For testing purposes, the product should offer support locally as it is one area where the tool has shortcomings."

"I want to suggest that Pinecone requires a login and API key, but I would prefer not to have a login system and to use the environment directly."

More Pinecone cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"We pay for a license."

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

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

"I have experience with the tool's free version."

"I think Pinecone is cheaper to use than other options I've explored. However, I also remember that they offer a paid version."

"The solution is relatively cheaper than other vector DBs in the market."

"Pinecone is not cheap; it's actually quite expensive. We find that using Pinecone can raise our budget significantly. On the other hand, using open-source options is more budget-friendly."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

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 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 do you like most about Pinecone?

We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases.

What needs improvement with Pinecone?

I give Pinecone a nine out of ten because I hope it provides an end-to-end agentic solution, but currently, it doesn't have those agentic capabilities, meaning I have to create a Streamlit applicat...

What is your primary use case for Pinecone?

My main use case for Pinecone is creating vector indexes for GenAI applications. A specific example of how I use Pinecone in one of my projects is utilizing a RAG pipeline where I take text from PD...

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Product Reports

Cassandra

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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

Pinecone is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving vector embeddings. It is highly praised for its scalability, speed, and ease of integration with existing workflows.

Users find it particularly useful for similarity search, recommendation systems, and natural language processing.

Its efficient search capabilities, seamless integration with existing systems, and ability to handle large-scale datasets make it a valuable tool for data analysis and retrieval.

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. Airbnb 2. DoorDash 3. Instacart 4. Lyft 5. Pinterest 6. Reddit 7. Slack 8. Snapchat 9. Spotify 10. TikTok 11. Twitter 12. Uber 13. Zoom 14. Adobe 15. Amazon 16. Apple 17. Facebook 18. Google 19. IBM 20. Microsoft 21. Netflix 22. Salesforce 23. Shopify 24. Square 25. Tesla 26. TikTok 27. Twitch 28. Uber Eats 29. WhatsApp 30. Yelp 31. Zillow 32. Zynga

Cassandra vs. Pinecone