Hazelcast Platform vs Memcached

Hazelcast Platform brings a distributed compute engine and an in-memory data store together for real-time and AI-driven applications. It can process streaming data before storage, supporting action on data in motion, and provides fast reads and writes for interactive request/response workloads. SQL processing, stateful processing, event-time windows, and Java and SQL are listed capabilities. WAN Replication synchronizes clusters and supports automatic failover to a secondary cluster for disaster recovery. Security features include JAAS role-based access controls and TLS encryption for data moving between nodes and applications. The platform runs on public and private clouds, is available through AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure marketplaces, and supports hybrid deployment. Its Kafka Connector processes Apache Kafka topic streams and sends processed data back to Kafka. Hazelcast identifies mission-critical, data-intensive AI workloads as a focus, including use in financial services, retail, supply chain, and healthcare. The platform is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as through an API and self-hosted deployment. A free plan and free 30-day Enterprise trial are listed; the trial requires a requested license key. The annual self-managed subscription includes professional support, with pricing available by request.

Memcached is a free, self-hosted in-memory key-value cache for reducing database load in dynamic web applications. It keeps small chunks of arbitrary data, such as strings, objects, and results from database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Clients use key-based hashing to choose a server, while servers operate independently without synchronization or replication. Items can expire after a specified time, and the default eviction policy is least recently used (LRU). The project describes Memcached as a developer tool, not code acceleration software or database middleware. Its API is available for most popular languages, and downloads include a source tarball and installation instructions with package prerequisites for Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat/CentOS. TLS authentication and encryption are supported in version 1.5.13 and later when built with TLS and used with a TLS-capable client. Optional extstore moves values to external storage while keeping keys and the hash table in memory; it needs version 1.6.0 or newer. The project began in 2003. It is free and self-hosted, with no hosted plan or price listed.