StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Databases
  4. Databases
  5. ActiveMQ vs Cassandra

ActiveMQ vs Cassandra

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Cassandra
Cassandra
Stacks3.6K
Followers3.5K
Votes507
GitHub Stars9.5K
Forks3.8K
ActiveMQ
ActiveMQ
Stacks880
Followers1.3K
Votes77
GitHub Stars2.4K
Forks1.5K

ActiveMQ vs Cassandra: What are the differences?

Introduction

Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Cassandra are two popular open-source technologies that serve different purposes. While ActiveMQ is a messaging system, Cassandra is a distributed NoSQL database. Understanding the key differences between these technologies can help organizations make informed decisions when choosing the right tool for their specific use case.

  1. Data Model: ActiveMQ is focused on message passing between applications using messaging patterns such as publish/subscribe and point-to-point. On the other hand, Cassandra is designed to store and retrieve large amounts of structured data, using a distributed and decentralized architecture that provides high availability and scalability for read and write operations.

  2. Consistency Model: ActiveMQ provides strong message consistency guarantees, ensuring that the message is delivered exactly once or at least once. In contrast, Cassandra offers tunable consistency levels, allowing users to choose between strong consistency (all nodes must agree on the state) and eventual consistency (updates may propagate to all nodes eventually).

  3. Query Language: ActiveMQ does not have a query language as its primary purpose is to facilitate message exchange between applications. Cassandra, on the other hand, supports CQL (Cassandra Query Language), which is similar to SQL and used to interact with the database for data retrieval and manipulation operations.

  4. Data Replication: In ActiveMQ, data replication is achieved through message brokers and clustering mechanisms to ensure message delivery and fault tolerance. Cassandra uses a masterless architecture with peer-to-peer replication, where each node in the cluster can handle read and write requests independently, providing high availability and fault tolerance.

  5. Scalability: ActiveMQ can be scaled vertically by adding more resources to the existing server, but it has limitations in terms of horizontal scalability. Cassandra is designed for linear scalability, allowing users to add more nodes to the cluster to handle increased workload and data storage requirements without sacrificing performance.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between ActiveMQ and Cassandra in terms of data model, consistency model, query language, data replication, and scalability can help organizations choose the right technology based on their specific requirements and use cases.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Cassandra, ActiveMQ

Vinay
Vinay

Head of Engineering

Sep 19, 2019

Needs advice

The problem I have is - we need to process & change(update/insert) 55M Data every 2 min and this updated data to be available for Rest API for Filtering / Selection. Response time for Rest API should be less than 1 sec.

The most important factors for me are processing and storing time of 2 min. There need to be 2 views of Data One is for Selection & 2. Changed data.

174k views174k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Cassandra
Cassandra
ActiveMQ
ActiveMQ

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

-
Protect your data & Balance your Load; Easy enterprise integration patterns; Flexible deployment
Statistics
GitHub Stars
9.5K
GitHub Stars
2.4K
GitHub Forks
3.8K
GitHub Forks
1.5K
Stacks
3.6K
Stacks
880
Followers
3.5K
Followers
1.3K
Votes
507
Votes
77
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 98
    High performance
  • 81
    High availability
  • 74
    Easy scalability
  • 53
    Replication
Cons
  • 3
    Reliability of replication
  • 1
    Size
  • 1
    Updates
Pros
  • 18
    Easy to use
  • 14
    Open source
  • 13
    Efficient
  • 10
    JMS compliant
  • 6
    High Availability
Cons
  • 1
    Low resilience to exceptions and interruptions
  • 1
    Difficult to scale
  • 1
    Support
  • 1
    ONLY Vertically Scalable

What are some alternatives to Cassandra, ActiveMQ?

MongoDB

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Memcached

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase