GridGain and Pivotal GemFire Feature Comparison
Pivotal GemFire® is an in-memory data grid (IMDG) powered by the Apache Geode™ open source project. It is used by companies to scale data services on demand to support high-performance, real-time applications.
GridGain®, built on the Apache® Ignite™ open source project, is an in-memory computing platform that includes a distributed in-memory data grid (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 or Hadoop database.
GemFire has many core IMDG capabilities, including the ability to distribute and partition data, and scale out across a cluster. But GemFire hasn’t evolved much in the last few years. Gemstone, the original company, was acquired in 2010 by VMWare and later spun out as part of Pivotal in 2012. In 2015 Pivotal donated GemFire code to the Apache Software Foundation for the Apache Geode project. Geode became a top-level Apache project the end of 2016.
GridGain is a superior 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, with over twice the commits of Apache Geode.
