GridGain and GigaSpaces Feature Comparison

The GigaSpaces^® XAP in-memory data grid (IMDG) is used by companies for fast data processing to scale applications. GigaSpaces InsightEdge^® bundles XAP with Apache^® Spark^™ for fast data analytics. Both are available as open source under an Apache 2.0 license (announced 2016) and as commercially supported software.

GridGain^®, built on the Apache^® Ignite^™ open source project, is an in-memory computing platform that includes a distributed IMDG, a hybrid SQL and key-value in-memory database (IMDB), a stream processing and analytics engine and a continuous learning framework that supports real-time machine and deep learning. It can be used with any RDBMS, NoSQL database or Hadoop database.

GigaSpaces has many of the core capabilities expected in an IMDG, including the ability to distribute and partition data, and scale out across a cluster. But like some other IMDGs, GigaSpaces hasn’t evolved much in the last five years. The company has instead chosen to focus more on InsightEdge and fast data analytics, as well as Cloudify, which it recently spun off.

GridGain is better than GigaSpaces as an IMDG for the majority of existing applications. This is due, in part to being built on the innovative Apache Ignite project. GridGain Systems donated the original Apache Ignite code to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in 2014 and remains the most active contributor. Ignite became a top level ASF project in 2015. Ignite is now one of the top five Apache Software Foundation open source projects in commits and list activity.