Abstract The availability of massive social media data has enabled the prediction of people’s future behavioral trends at an unprecedented large scale. Information cascades study on Twitter has been an integral part of behavior analysis. A number of methods based on the transactional features (such as keyword frequency) and the semantic features (such as sentiment) have been proposed to predict the future cascading trends. However, an in-depth understanding of the pros and cons of semantic and transactional models is lacking. This paper conducts a comparative study of both approaches in predicting information diffusion with three mechanisms: retweet cascade, url cascade, and hashtag cascade. Experiments on Twitter data show that the semantic model outperforms the transactional model, if the exterior pattern is less directly observable (i.e. hashtag cascade). When it becomes more directly observable (i.e. retweet and url cascades), the semantic method yet delivers approximate accuracy (i.e. url cascade) or even worse accuracy (i.e. retweet cascade). Further, we demonstrate that the transactional and semantic models are not independent, and the performance gets greatly enhanced when combining both.