Cassandra and MongoDB both are types of NoSQL databases. Cassandra is a distributed database system designed to handle large amount of data and known for its high scalability and high performance. While, MongoDB is document oriented database which also provides high scalability, high performance and automatic scaling.

In terms of simplicity, databases can be divided in two types:

  • Development simplicity
  • Operational simplicity

While MongoDB is known for an easy out-of-the-box experience, Cassandra is known for easy to manage at scale.

Following is a list of important differences between them:

Index

Cassandra

Mongodb

1)

Cassandra is high performance distributed database system.

MongoDB is cross-platform document-oriented database system.

2)

Cassandra is written in Java.

MongoDB is written in C++.

3)

Cassandra stores data in tabular form like SQL format.

MongoDB stores data in JSON format.

4)

Cassandra is got license by Apache.

MongoDB is got license by AGPL and drivers by Apache.

5)

Cassandra is mainly designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers.

MongoDB is designed to deal with JSON-like documents and access applications easier and faster.

6)

Cassandra provides high availability with no single point of failure.

MongoDB is easy to administer in the case of failure.

Key Points of Apache Cassandra

  • Cassandra is highly scalable, high performance, consistent and fault-tolerant database system. Cassandra is a column-oriented database.
  • Cassandra provides easy data distribution.
  • Cassandra supports ACID properties i.e. Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.
  • Cassandra follows the distribution design of Amazon?s dynamo and its data model design is based on Google's Bigtable.
  • Cassandra was initially created at Facebook for inbox search and now it is being used by some of the biggest companies like Facebook, Twitter, ebay, Netflix, Cisco, Rackspace etc.

Key Points of MongoDB

  • MongoDB is well suited for Bigdata and mobile & social infrastructure.
  • MongoDB provides Replication, High availability and Auto-sharding.
  • MongoDB is used by companies like Foursquare, Intuit, Shutterfly, SourceForge, The New York Times, Lexis Nexis Orange Digital etc.