Cactus groups Jn are currently attracting considerable interest from diverse mathematical communities. This work explores their relations to right-angled Coxeter groups, and in particular twin groups Twn and Mostovoy's Gauss diagram groups Dn, which are better understood. Concretely, we construct an injective group 1-cocycle from Jn to Dn, and show that Twn (and its k-leaf generalisations) inject into Jn. As a corollary, we solve the word problem for cactus groups, determine their torsion (which is only even) and center (which is trivial), and answer the same questions for pure cactus groups, PJn. In addition, we yield a 1-relator presentation of the first non-abelian pure cactus group PJ4. Our tools come mainly from combinatorial group theory.