The below image describes the different clients of Cassandra and the underlying communication protocol used and documentation link to each Basic Thrift https://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ThriftExamples Astyanix https://github.com/Netflix/astyanax Hector https://hector-client.github.io/hector/build/html/documentation.html Cassnadra JDBC Driver: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache-extras.cassandra-jdbc/cassandra-jdbc/1.2.1 Datastax Java driver Example : https://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/java-driver/3.3/manual/ Compatibility Chart : http://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/driver-matrix/doc/javaDrivers.html#java-drivers