Distinctive Strengths

It is open source.

Hazelcast stores everything in-memory (RAM). It is designed to perform fast reads and updates.

Hazelcast is peer-to-peer; there is no single point of failure in a Hazelcast cluster; each member in the cluster is configured to be functionally the same. They all store equal amounts of data and do equal amounts of processing. You can embed Hazelcast in your existing application or use it in client and server mode where your application is a client to Hazelcast members.

When the size of your memory and compute requirements increase, new members can be dynamically joined to the Hazelcast cluster to scale elastically.

Data is resilient to member failure. Data backups are distributed across the cluster. This is a big benefit when a member in the cluster crashes as data is not lost. Hazelcast keeps the backup of each data entry on multiple members. On a member failure, the data is restored from the backup and the cluster continues to operate without downtime.

Members are always aware of each other unlike in traditional key-value caching solutions.

Hazelcast provides out-of-the-box distributed data structures.

analytic applications requiring big data processing by partitioning the data

to retain frequently accessed data in the grid

a cache, particularly an open source JCache provider with elastic distributed scalability

a primary data store for applications with utmost performance, scalability and low-latency requirements

an In-Memory NoSQL Key Value Store

publish/subscribe communication at highest speed and scalability between applications

applications that need to scale elastically in distributed and cloud environments

a highly available distributed cache for applications

an alternative to Coherence and Terracotta.