Cassandra and MongoDB are both NoSQL databases. Cassandra is a high performance distributed database written in Java that stores data in a tabular format like SQL, while MongoDB is a document-oriented database written in C++ that stores data in JSON format. The document compares the two databases on various characteristics like data structure, scalability, availability, licensing and usage by companies. It also provides overviews of Cassandra's column-oriented data model and MongoDB's support for replication, high availability and auto-sharding.