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Cassandra vs PostgreSQL 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)
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Vector Databases
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 1.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 5.2%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
PavithrarajShetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers simplicity and is cheaply priced
I haven't gone through the scalability aspect since I was using MySQL Server. I haven't worked to a high level in PostgreSQL, but with MySQL Server, I have managed clustering and partitioning. I think I haven't put much focus on PostgreSQL, so I am not sure how it behaves or how it works.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am satisfied with the performance."
"The technical evaluation is very good."
"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 most valuable features of Cassandra are its scaling capabilities and its non-SQL nature capabilities."
"Cassandra offers high availability and fault tolerance, making it suitable for large-scale data storage and real-time processing."
"We can add almost one million columns to the solution."
"The most valuable features of Cassandra are the NoSQL database, high performance, and zero-copy streaming."
"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."
"We managed to reduce the storage space needed to 10% of the original size, without affecting data integrity, and we significantly improved the performance."
"The product's deployment is easy."
"The community support and the open-source community for it are good."
"The system can perform faster analysis by providing it with a lot of memory. Speed is crucial for analytics. Currently, the main reason we haven't adopted Elasticsearch is that we lack the necessary expertise to manage it."
"The solution has many valuable features such as it easy to use and the interface is intuitive."
"It is very useful for both structured and unstructured data. You can store unstructured and structured data in PostgreSQL. It is easy to use. You can easily manage things through PostgreSQL Admin. It is cost-effective. Its on-premise version is free. It is agnostic of on-premise or cloud. You can install it on the cloud or on-premises. It is available with all clouds, and you can also install it on desktop or Windows Servers."
"PostgreSQL makes it very adaptable to several descriptions of a record. Instead of having several tables or several relations for one entity, I can adapt this entity. It can be a multiform entity. For example, here in Mexico, a company and a person can be sold to us as a physical entity or a physical person."
"The most valuable feature is the performance."
 

Cons

"Depending upon our schema, we can't make ORDER BY or GROUP BY clauses in the product."
"The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved."
"The disc space is lacking. You need to free it up as you are working."
"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."
"There could be more integration, and it could be more user-friendly."
"Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem."
"The solution doesn't have joins between tables so you need other tools for that."
"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."
"PostgreSQL doesn't have a feature for temporal SQL, which is useful for gathering versions of data. This feature should be included in PostgreSQL. This feature is available in MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle Database, and DB2."
"PostgreSQL’s performance could be improved."
"There are some products out there that have a slightly different method of implementation for the SQL language. Some of those are slightly better in some areas, and PostgreSQL is slightly better in some areas. I would probably like to match all of those products together. It is just down to the functionality. For example, Oracle has a number of options within SQL that are outside of what you would class as the SQL standard. PostgreSQL misses some of those, but PostgreSQL does other things that are better than what Oracle does. I would like to merge those two products so that there is a certain amount of functionality in a single product."
"When you get a large number of records in a database and start doing various queries, it can adversely impact the performance of the live running systems. That's an area we continue to look at and mean to improve, but it is not only because of PostgreSQL. It is also because of the way the schemas are put together, and certain events are triggered. So, it is because of both parties."
"We often find the solution's datetime datatype challenging."
"Integration with other platforms could be improved."
"The search option is not very good."
"Sometimes, it becomes slow because of the network. So, there is room for improvement in performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are licensing fees that must be paid, but I'm not sure if they are paid monthly or yearly."
"I don't have the specific numbers on pricing, but it was fairly priced."
"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."
"We pay for a license."
"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"We use the open-source version of PostgreSQL and not the enterprise edition."
"This solution can offer a cheaper choice for customers since it is open-source."
"PostgreSQL is open-source, so if capable admins are available then the setup cost can be $0."
"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."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"The solution requires a license."
"It is an open-source platform."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
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 do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

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Find out what your peers are saying about Cassandra vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
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