DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	106.65
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	13.49
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.33
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2008

2012

2009

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

users and table-level permissions

More information provided by the system vendor

News

A Decade of Apache Cassandra® Data Modeling
20 March 2025

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18 March 2025

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14 March 2025

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13 March 2025

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12 March 2025

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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Recent citations in the news

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8 November 2024, AWS Blog

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25 February 2025, The Register

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6 September 2024, VentureBeat

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11 November 2024, Blocks and Files

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