Skip to main content
TrustRadius
IBM Cloudant

IBM Cloudant

Overview

What is IBM Cloudant?

Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web…

Read more
Recent Reviews

Win-Win for IBM Cloud

9 out of 10
April 18, 2021
Incentivized
We were using IBM Cloudant as our cloud storage platform for a project where we were collecting real-time environmental data. Later, we …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 7 features
  • Concurrency (21)
    9.9
    99%
  • Performance (21)
    9.8
    98%
  • Security (21)
    9.8
    98%
  • Availability (21)
    8.1
    81%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Standard

$1

Cloud
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB

Standard

$75

Cloud
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second

Lite

Free

Cloud
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant/pric…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Features

NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases are designed to be used across large distrusted systems. They are notably much more scalable and much faster and handling very large data loads than traditional relational databases.

9.4
Avg 8.8
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is IBM Cloudant?

IBM Cloudant is a distributed database that is optimized for handling heavy workloads that are typical of large, fast-growing web and mobile apps. Available as an SLA-backed, fully managed IBM Cloud service, Cloudant elastically scales throughput and storage independently. Cloudant is also available as a downloadable on-premises installation, and its API and replication protocol are compatible with an open source ecosystem that includes CouchDB, PouchDB and libraries for the most popular web and mobile development stacks.

IBM Cloudant Features

NoSQL Databases Features

  • Supported: Performance
  • Supported: Availability
  • Supported: Concurrency
  • Supported: Security
  • Supported: Scalability
  • Supported: Data model flexibility
  • Supported: Deployment model flexibility

IBM Cloudant Video

database management with Cloudant

IBM Cloudant Competitors

IBM Cloudant Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional

Frequently Asked Questions

Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications. Cloudant scales your database on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant is often considered part of a new generation of 'NoSQL' databases that don't require fixed table schemas and is challenging the dominance of traditional relational databases (including the popular MySQL).

Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, and Couchbase Server are common alternatives for IBM Cloudant.

Reviewers rate Concurrency and Data model flexibility highest, with a score of 9.9.

The most common users of IBM Cloudant are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(123)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-23 of 23)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
July 17, 2022

A simple database with fully-featured GUI, "just works" scaling and replication, and straightforward pricing

Verified User
General Manager in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 1-10 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
In my experience using IBM Cloudant for applications that involve mostly CRUD operations, I never felt like scaling would be a concern. I can simply dial in the exact amount of throughput to match the needs of my application's traffic. Having the scaling abstracted away is a huge time saver and allows me to better estimate costs.
April 28, 2021

Scaling our data layer without headaches

Nicolas Peeters | TrustRadius Reviewer
Nicolas Peeters
VP of Engineering
AirFi / MI Airline (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
9
In general, Cloudant feels very stable with large volumes of data (specifically with the multi-tenant setup). It allows us to scale our growth in the terms of transactions (summer months in our operation) without too many headaches.

- Pure response time speed is actually something to be improved.
- The performance of the Dashboard (especially with a lot of databases) needs improvement.

There are a few cases where we noticed issues: some replication jobs were not properly triggered (this is a long standing issue that we are dealing with with the support team).
April 08, 2020

Cloudant is hands down one of the greatest development decision I've made.

Verified User
Engineer in Other
Computer Software Company, 1-10 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
8
At this time I have only compared Cloudant to my previously (self hosted) deployment of MongoDB. Using Cloudant was the clear and superior choice when deciding between the two. When using Cloudant I've not had to worry about sharding or server down time. When comparing response times and hardware requirements Cloudant has far surpassed MongoDB with speed and storage availability. With the multi-cloud deployment system of Cloudant coupled with the geo balancing allows for content to be quickly available anywhere.
August 29, 2019

Best for mobile

Victor Pease Solano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Victor Pease Solano
General Manager
Supermio (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
Because of the offline-first architecture, most of the transactions are handled on the client, requiring less power on the server. Also, because it's plain http, the overload on the client is almost nothing.

Cost and performance is in balance using Cloudant as a backend compared with other hosted solutions.
September 09, 2016

Cloudant is a great choice for DBaaS for mobile apps on multiple platforms and devices...

Wes Wilson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Wes Wilson
CTO (Chief Technical Officer)
YukonBaby (Hospital & Health Care, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
9
The service scales incredibly well. As you would expect from CloudDB and IBM combination. The only reason I wouldn't score it a 10 is the fact that document trees can get nested and nested very quickly if you are attempting to do very complex datasets. Which makes your code that much more complex to deal. Its very possible we could find a solution to this problem with better database planning to begin with, but one of the reasons we chose a service over a self-hosted solution was so we could set it up quick and forget about it. So we weren't going to dedicate a team to architecture optimization.
August 12, 2016

Flexible data transportation HUB without structure constraints

Romualdo Gobbo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Romualdo Gobbo
Owner
NEWLOG Consulting Srl (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Scalability
10
As a DB-as-a-Service, Cloudant has freed us from this kind of problem. Using the IBM Bluemix dashboard you can control how many transaction are executed in milliseconds and this is for now our rating of scalability between 200-24 milliseconds for one http POST (insert document), well under the project rate that was defined by an order of magnitude.
August 03, 2016

Cloudant: the best choice for my company

Carlos Eduardo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Carlos Eduardo
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Techood Mobile (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
The Cloudant's scalability is very powerful. Every time that we needed an extra resource to improve our data process, we got it. Cloudant's scalability responded very quickly and never allowed our data process get slower or stop for any reason.
August 01, 2016

Short and sweet

Kris Bandurski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kris Bandurski
Executive Vice President, Engineering
Green Man Gaming (Retail, 51-200 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
8
We had our cluster scaled out for a promotion that involved a huge increase in write requests. The important thing there is that by scaling out, i.e., having additional nodes spun up, we increased the cluster's processing power and ingest capacity without any downtime.
July 29, 2016

If it fits your need, you'll never have problems or complaints.

Bryan Redeagle | TrustRadius Reviewer
Bryan Redeagle
Developer
Qubit Networks (Telecommunications, 11-50 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
I'm storing 200K records, and a query takes millimseconds. I've never had timeout issues in our Client portal where we pull the information. I haven't taken benchmarks, but perceptually I've noticed no slowness. I've thought about future scaling, but With no slowness already I'm wondering if I'll even see any.
July 20, 2016

I traded self-hosted for Cloudant

Don Burks | TrustRadius Reviewer
Don Burks
CTO
Lighthouse Labs (Restaurants, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
We went from a small MVP database of just over 24MB of data to over 2GB in a matter of days when customers started putting data into our service. Cloudant didn't even blink. I'm sure we could have scaled another 10 times over and there wouldn't have even been a flutter of latency in our query times.
July 19, 2016

Cloudant - help you manage your cloud

Verified User
Employee in Engineering
Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
Real time processing were much easier and efficient.

We had to process more than 50TB of data which was made much easier with Cloudant, and there was not much difference in performance even if we had increased another 50TB of data. To me, it's a wonderful option of NoSQL database and for IoT related projects.
January 13, 2016

The best prices and easy from start to scale

Peter Ivie | TrustRadius Reviewer
Peter Ivie
Full Stack Developer
GeneSys Foundation (Internet, 1-10 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
5
I have not yet had occasion to put the scalability to the test. However, perceived scalability was one of the reasons I chose Cloudant. I want to be able to expand when the time comes without having to put a lot of time and effort into it. Cloudant fits into that zone nicely.
January 04, 2016

Cloundant Just Works! The best for us: The API.

JA
Jesús Aponte
Ayudante Académico Nivel II
Universidad Simón Bolívar (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
10
We don't have theoretical limits in the quantity of assets we want to track. We love the notion of revision of documents. We make constant modification to static documents and the capacity for a document to keep track of the revisions, even large quantities of them is a plus for us.
January 04, 2016

Cloudant DBaaS review

Verified User
Project Manager in Corporate
Computer Networking Company, 51-200 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Scalability
7
As I mentioned in the pros, Cloudant offers datacenter choices at Softlayer where we host most of our projects with, in this case, the data transaction can be regarded as being processed in the private SL's backend network which indicates that the latency is lower and no additional firewall needs to be equipped. Moreover, Cloudant charges multi-tenant at the PAYG method, which can easily control our cost.
Return to navigation