Feature Comparison: Redis vs Hazelcast

Introduction

Redis and Hazelcast are two popular options for building an in-memory database - but which one is best for your purposes? In this article, we'll discuss how you can make the right choice between Redis and Hazelcast.

What is Redis?

Redis is an open-source in-memory key-value data structure store that can be used to implement a database, cache, and message broker. The Redis software is written in C and includes support for high-level data types such as strings, lists, maps, and sets. Many developers like Redis for its lightweight footprint, good performance, and high availability.

What is Hazelcast?

Hazelcast is an open-source in-memory data grid platform written in the Java programming language that is often used to implement caches. The basic units of Hazelcast are nodes and clusters. Each of the nodes in a cluster is tasked with managing part of the data. This distributed system makes I/O and processing much more efficient.


3 Major Differences Between Redis and Hazelcast


Threading

Although Redis is single-threaded, it uses a high-performance core with a very low memory footprint. This advantage enables you to easily run multiple Redis instances on a single machine, making full use of all CPU cores.

The "split brain" problem is a networking issue in which nodes lose communications between them. Each node believes that it is the primary node, which can result in data corruption as multiple nodes access the same file or disk. Redis' single-threaded model is able to protect against the split brain problem during write operations; however, Hazelcast's multi-threaded model cannot.

Clustering

Hazelcast provides automatic discovery of multicast routers through the UDP protocol. Redis, on the other hand, does not. The developers of Redis believe that automatic discovery does not save time when compared with the costs of troubleshooting and administering the full environment.

For this reason, Redis is available as a fully managed service from many cloud providers, including:

These fully managed services offer advantages such as full Redis automation, support, monitoring, and administration. As such, they allow developers to focus on building their applications, not on the database itself.

Memory handling

Redis easily handles terabytes of RAM, thanks to the reliable jemalloc memory allocator. Data types such as hashes, lists, and sets are encoded to use memory very efficiently, with an average savings of 5 times less memory.

Meanwhile, the non-commercial version of Hazelcast stores all distributed data in on-heap memory served by the Java garbage collector. As the amount of data grows, therefore, garbage collection might cause pauses in the execution of the application. These pauses affect the application's performance and may also cause more serious problems and errors.


Comparison


Redis does not include compatibility with the Java programming language right out of the box. Instead, many Redis users make use of Java clients like Redisson in order to gain access to Java objects, collections, and services in Redis.

In this section, we'll discuss the differences between Redisson and Hazelcast in terms of their features. In general, Redisson includes more Java functionality than Hazelcast.

Distributed collections
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Map
Multimap
Set
List
Queue
Deque
SortedSet
ScoredSortedSet
PriorityQueue
PriorityDeque
DelayedQueue
TransferQueue
RingBuffer
TimeSeries
Distributed locks and synchronizers
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Lock
Semaphore
CountDownLatch
FairLock
MultiLock
ReadWriteLock
PermitExpirableSemaphore
Distributed objects
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Object holder
AtomicLong
LongAdder
DoubleAdder
Publish/Subscribe
Reliable Publish/Subscribe
Id Generator
AtomicDouble
Geospatial
BitSet
BloomFilter
BinaryStream
HyperLogLog
RateLimiter
Advanced cache support
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
JCache API
JCache API with near cache (up to 45x faster)
Near Cache
API architecture
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Asynchronous API partial support
Reactive API
RxJava3 API
Transactions
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Transactions API
XA Transactions
Distributed services
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
ExecutorService
MapReduce
SchedulerService
RemoteService
LiveObjectService
Integration with frameworks
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Spring Cache
Spring Cache with near cache (up to 45x faster)
Hibernate Cache
Hibernate Cache with near cache (up to 5x faster)
MyBatis Cache
MyBatis Cache with near cache (up to 45x faster)
Tomcat Session Manager
Spring Session
Statistics monitoring 20 different statistics monitoring systems including JMX JMX, NewRelic, AppDynamics
Security
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Authentication
Authorization
SSL support
Custom data serialization
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
JSON codec
JDK Serialization
Avro codec
Smile codec
CBOR codec
MsgPack codec
Kryo codec
FST codec
LZ4 compression codec
Snappy compression codec
Stability and ease of use
Redis + Redisson Hazelcast
Fully-managed services support
(AWS Elasticache, Azure Cache, IBM Bluemix...)
Large memory amount handling Open-source version has limitations
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