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How does this compare to Apache Cassandra?

Cassandra is a NoSQL database, so you get horizontal scalability but need to deal with eventual consistency and there is no SQL support. It is similar to Google Bigtable [0].

Spanner is a database that merges the horizontal scalability of a NoSQL database with the strong consistency and SQL semantics of a relational database, basically the best of both worlds. People like to call this type of database "NewSQL."

Cassandra is also open source, Spanner is not. CockroachDB is the OSS clone of Spanner, but there are some differences and tradeoffs to be made as with all things.

(I work at Google Cloud)

[0] https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/

Thanks, I forgot about the NoSQL part due to tunable consistency. I remembered Cassandra as almost similar to SQL databases with horizontal scalability.

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