Amazon DynamoDB vs IBM Cloudant

Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB is well suited when you have small development team and want ease of scaling and operations. Since it is hosted by Amazon, it provides a fully managed service. It provides great read and write for simple queries. When you have complex queries, I think this is not well suited. We need to remember this is not suited for a relational database.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Entertainment Company, 11-50 employees

View all 13 answers on this topic

IBM Cloudant

The solution to store claims information worked for us, but the enterprise NoSQL market has expanded so much that we might not [have] used Cloudant had an alternative been available. Make sure you ask about ACID compliance and about what the difference between NoSQL and SQL databases are to that the IT managers understand why they are buying and how that differs from data solutions they've bought in the past.

Read full review

Verified User

Analyst in Marketing

Retail Company, 51-200 employees

View all 22 answers on this topic

Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon DynamoDB

7.9

IBM Cloudant

—

Performance

8.0

—

Availability

8.4

—

Concurrency

9.0

—

Security

8.7

—

Scalability

9.7

—

Data model flexibility

4.0

—

Deployment model flexibility

7.3

—

Pros

Fast retrieval
Auto scaling to control costs
Query and scanning allow for different use cases

Read full review

Adam Lauer

Software Engineer

Earth NetworksEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

View all 13 answers on this topic

We had a small data mart project that required the storage of some rather highly connected data that also had a relatively small footprint. This made IBM Cloudant an obvious choice because we could store the data in a data structure that met our project need al while using a platform that our web development team understood and was comfortable with.
We had a bunch of geospatial data that we needed for analysis. Having GeoJSON being natively supported by Cloudant made it an easy choice.
Cloudant was cloud-based and didn't require a DBA support it, this allowed the project to move ahead without pushback from the infrastructure team.

Read full review

Verified User

Analyst in Marketing

Retail Company, 51-200 employees

View all 22 answers on this topic

Cons

Can get very expensive very fast
Sharding and hot spotting are hidden problems that can cause ALOT of head ache
Not relational or transactional at all

Read full review

Adam Lauer

Software Engineer

Earth NetworksEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

View all 13 answers on this topic

It was only after we went with the cloud-based solution that IBM rolled out an on-premise version.
We found that a 3rd-party ODBC driver was required for a few applications that needed to pull data out of Cloudant.
The sales process was difficult because the salesperson we used was not as versed on Cloudant as I had hoped.

Read full review

Verified User

Analyst in Marketing

Retail Company, 51-200 employees

View all 22 answers on this topic

Likelihood to Renew

Amazon DynamoDB6.9

Based on 13 answers

Its more of a we are locked in and migration would be more time and resource intensive than is worth it. It is better to find ways to optimize dynamo usage like custom scaling, Redis based caches, or moving data to S3 than to leave the platflorm completely. It provides enough incentive and usefulness to continue to use

Read full review

Adam Lauer

Software Engineer

Earth NetworksEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

View all 13 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Ask the community to sound off

Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Ask the community to sound off

IBM Cloudant7.7

Based on 5 answers

cloudant adds some features to improve security and data query like tokens and cloudant query that really adds a lot of power to these features over the standard CouchDB. also you can integrate your data into a relational schema using ibm dashdb for data analysis. everything is in the right place

Read full review

victor pease solano

General Manager

SupermioComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 5 answers on this topic

Support

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Ask the community to sound off

IBM Cloudant7.8

Based on 3 answers

Quick response times, knowledgable and helpful support staff.

Read full review

Kris Bandurski

Executive Vice President, Engineering

Green Man GamingRetail, 51-200 employees

View all 3 answers on this topic

Implementation

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Ask the community to sound off

IBM Cloudant8.8

Based on 4 answers

The performance and cost are both over our expectations

Read full review

victor pease solano

General Manager

SupermioComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

DynamoDB is fully managed which is a great plus over MongoDB. The feature set is not as strong on MongoDB's for document databases, but it the managed aspect is highly compelling. Similarly for Cassandra, DynamoDB is managed. DynamoDB scales much better than CouchDB.

Read full review

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 11-50 employees

View all 13 answers on this topic

Its easier to use than Dynamo, more open than Firebase, and has better documentation that CouchDB... it might not be fair to compare Modulus, Modulus obviously suffers from some scalability issues and might not be in the same class... but its a hosted DB service we had some experience with in the past....

Read full review

Wes Wilson

CTO (Chief Technical Officer)

YukonBabyHospital & Health Care, 1-10 employees

View all 22 answers on this topic

Scalability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Ask the community to sound off

IBM Cloudant8.6

Based on 21 answers

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.

Read full review

Romualdo Gobbo

Owner

NEWLOG Consulting SrlComputer Software, 11-50 employees

View all 21 answers on this topic

Return on Investment

We were able to achieve our goal using Amazon – store every single email our system that has ever been sent in fluid database for long term recover without significantly impacting query times at scale.
We have been unable to effectively add additional features using the data set because of the pricing structure and incurred cost involved with performing repeated scans over the dataset.

Read full review

Justin Schroeder

Full Stack Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

View all 13 answers on this topic

Cloudant allowed us to implement a project faster due to it being fully managed and basically a plug-and-play type data store.
Being fully managed meant that we spent a fair bit of time on the phone yelling at IBM Support because they didn't know jack about how to solve the issues we ran into/
Overall Cloudant worked for us because the project timeline and budget allowed for more money to be spent on services rather than hardware (OpEx vs CapEx).

Read full review

Verified User

Analyst in Marketing

Retail Company, 51-200 employees

View all 22 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

Amazon DynamoDB

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Additional Pricing Details

—

More Information

Amazon DynamoDB More Information

IBM Cloudant

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Additional Pricing Details

There is never a charge for the first $50 of usage each month. After that, data volume is charged at $1 per GB/month, "heavy" API requests (PUTs, POSTs, DELETEs) are charged at $0.015 per 100 each month, and "light" API requests (GETs, HEADs) are charged at $0.015 per 500 each month. API requests that read or write multiple JSON docs in bulk count as 1 API request.