Apache Cassandra vs. Apache HBase

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cassandra
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cassandra is a no-SQL database from Apache.N/A
HBase
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.N/A
Pricing
Apache CassandraApache HBase
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CassandraHBase
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache CassandraApache HBase
Features
Apache CassandraApache HBase
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache Cassandra
8.0
Ratings
10% below category average
Apache HBase
7.7
Ratings
14% below category average
Performance8.50 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Availability8.80 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Concurrency7.60 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Security8.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Scalability9.50 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Data model flexibility6.70 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility7.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache CassandraApache HBase
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache CassandraApache HBase
Likelihood to Recommend
6.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache CassandraApache HBase
Likelihood to Recommend
Cassandra excels in a broad range of applications -- especially if you understand its data model and write your applications accordingly. It's an excellent choice for time-series data, and a poor choice for application queues. It performs the best if you can simply record history and compute from it, rather than going back and editing or deleting things a lot.
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HBase is well suited for streaming ingest, fast lookups, massive datasets, data warehouse lookup tables, RDBMS replacement, MongoDB replacement, key-value store, data scans, logs, JSON storage and some binary storage. My preferred use case is for storing data points like time series or data produced by sensors. I often use HBase when I need data available immediately and I am not looking for transactions. This is a great store for really wide tables with tons of columns. It is also great if you are not sure what type of data you are going to have. It really excels at sparse data.
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Pros
  • High Availability - we utilize the data replication features of Cassandra. This enables us to access our data even when several nodes have gone down
  • Data Locality - our architecture combines Cassandra storage nodes and computation nodes in the same machine. This enables us to utilize data locality and limit expensive network IO to read data.
  • Elasticity - Cassandra is a shared nothing architecture. Nodes can be added very easily and they discover the network topology. As soon as a node has joined the Cassandra ring, the data is redistributed among the existing nodes and streamed to it automatically.
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  • Scalable and truly non-relational data
  • HBase operations run in real-time on its database rather than MapReduce jobs
  • Scales linearly to support billions of rows with millions of columns
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Cons
  • No Ad-Hoc Queries: Cassandra data storage layer is basically a key-value storage system. This means that you must "model" your data around the queries you want to surface, rather than around the structure of the data itself.
  • There are no aggregations queries available in Cassandra.
  • Not fit for transactional data.
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  • Write performance
  • Performance support for parquet file format. supports, but performance wise still not there
  • API / library availability for spark, rather than creating a new library for it
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Likelihood to Renew
I would recommend Cassandra DB to those who know their use case very well, as well as know how they are going to store and retrieve data. If you need a guarantee in data storage and retrieval, and a DB that can be linearly grown by adding nodes across availability zones and regions, then this is the database you should choose.
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There's really not anything else out there that I've seen comparable for my use cases. HBase has never proven me wrong. Some companies align their whole business on HBase and are moving all of their infrastructure from other database engines to HBase. It's also open source and has a very collaborative community.
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Usability
It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Apache Cassandra has the best of both worlds, it is a Java based NoSQL, linearly scalable, best in class
tunable performance across different workloads, fault tolerant, distributed, masterless, time series database. We have used both Apache HBase and MongoDB for some use cases which were within hadoop setup and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document store respectively, but given the overall factors favoring Apache Cassandra, it is a technology choice for multiple platforms!
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Compared NoSQL databases with traditional databases for faster retrieval and consistency. As MongoDB is a NoSQL supports dynamic fields, however, query performance is bad for aggregations and added maintenance. When compared with MySQL and Teradata, it could not scale up as fast as Hbase and added cost involved to it. HBase can be easily scalable to a huge volume of records, have a faster lookup and provides consistency
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Return on Investment
  • The open source version of Cassandra is only suggested for learning the basic concepts and play with its core features. Unless you really want to invest a lot in your developers and architects knowing every detail of Cassandra, I prefer the DataStax enterprise version. Although the license cost is relatively high, I think they it is worth it. I'm thinking about the support, the monitoring tool OpsCenter, and the integration of Solr and Spark (for data analysis).
  • Cassandra didn't fully replace our old and traditional relation database Oracle. In addition, it opens another door for us to deal with some special business use cases that NoSQL database can do better in a more feasible and efficient way.
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  • Positive: Open source, easy to use, good to store big data.
  • Negative: SQL functionalities are not available.
  • More memory utilization
  • More troubleshooting
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