Apache CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CouchDB
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Apache CouchDB is an HTTP + JSON document database with Map Reduce views and bi-directional replication. The Couch Replication Protocol is implemented in a variety of projects and products that span computing environments from globally distributed server-clusters, over mobile phones to web browsers.N/A
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
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…
$1
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Pricing
Apache CouchDBIBM Cloudant
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$1
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Standard
$75
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second
Lite
Free
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity
Standard
Included
per month 20 GB of storage
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CouchDBIBM Cloudant
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache CouchDBIBM Cloudant
Considered Both Products
CouchDB
Chose CouchDB
Open Source, and freely able to install it on any OS you desire (the big 3, anyways) CouchDB was selected for that, it's early-adoption of JSON and its mobile-friendly environment. Also, I have used it off and on in various non-professional projects, and it was really one of …
Chose CouchDB
Compared to MongoDB, CouchDB's Map-Reduce paradigm poses a steeper learning curve for SQL users. However, CouchDB's master-master replication is an advantage of implementing a load-balanced solution.
Even though, currently, CouchDB has strong community support, as an open …
Chose CouchDB
MongoDB and CouchDB are both document stores, but their concurrency models and ability to scale are very different. MongoDB cannot replicate / shard over unreliable links and network partitions have been the cause of data loss in the past. MongoDB has an easier query language …
Chose CouchDB
It has been 5+ years since we chose CouchDB. We looked an MongoDB, Cassandra, and probably some others. At the end of the day, the performance, power potential, and simplicity of CouchDB made it a simple choice for our needs. No one should use just because we did. As I said …
Chose CouchDB
S3 blew this out of the water, we can get over 30 files a second, almost no failures, auto backed up, don't need our own server, and a much simpler interface with PHP Laravel.
Chose CouchDB
We looked at MongoDB and Firebase. MongoDB gives us the best working db engine with a very intuitive design. However, it does not work as well offline. Firebase was extremely hard to create searching and indexing. Using a third-party to search didn't work for us or at least it …
Chose CouchDB
Developing spring boot apps with Couchbase using Spring Data JPA really solves complexity of programming.
Chose CouchDB
I have briefly used MongoDB in other products, and it proved that it had better integration capabilities with Ruby on Rails and node.js software platforms, more than CouchDB. But I never had the chance to actually replace CouchDB with MongoDB in the current product to see what …
Chose CouchDB
It stacks up well against Mongo DB. Mongo DB definitely has more marketing and developer and customer mindshare because it is so widely known.
Chose CouchDB
CouchbaseDB is essentially faster with more options but of course with a cost. Cloudant is the hosted option with a better security schema.
IBM Cloudant
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM cloudant documentation is very easy to understand and because of that the implementation is also very easy. We found some difficulties in case of aws documents implementation. Performance of the cloudant database is also high as compare to the other databases. Indexing and …
Chose IBM Cloudant
I like [the] ease of use of Cloudant. Redis and Fauna have time to live features so for caching and temp data that is what I use along with messaging queues.
Chose IBM Cloudant
MongoDB Atlas and Azure Cosmos DB are the closest competitors we found with Cloudant, especially in terms of fixed pricing and having a GUI for easy viewing and quick edits of data. Cloudant's pricing model flat out beats MongoDB Atlas' in terms of how easy it would be to …
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant is great for quick deployment and configs of a database service, especially when it comes to rapid prototyping. In a research capacity, we need to spin up web services and run experiments quickly. IBM Cloudant is a fuss-free database service [that] aids in this …
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant wins in all aspects, from cost, ease of deployment, features, global availability and much more.
Chose IBM Cloudant
The gap that we wanted to cover was to deploy a self-managed CouchDB environment, which would allow us the bidirectional replication of Databases through several physical locations of the same client. IBM Cloudant was the best choice after evaluating some other platforms with …
Chose IBM Cloudant
MS SQl is more specific to relational data. Overall, it is more mature with a more feature-filled interface, user access management, and tools to manage data.
Chose IBM Cloudant
None, since we are a dedicated IBM Gold Business Partner as well as a respected IBM development and design partner, we stick with IBM products.
Chose IBM Cloudant
The feature-set, including security, is very comparable. Overall, IBM's services added to the product are mature and stable, although product support and engineers could be a little better. Global availability is improving, and Disaster Recover Capabilities are great. Overall, …
Chose IBM Cloudant
In our case, it was a no-brainer since we were using IBM Cloud. In comparison to DB2 the ease of use and JSON support was the key.
Chose IBM Cloudant
As its documentation and help are always available, it's easier to manage than any other database mentioned.
Chose IBM Cloudant
As I mentioned Redis was the first option for this implementation, IBM Cloudant excels the data center sync.
Chose IBM Cloudant
I have mainly used Cloudant as I work with IBM Cloud in my role and therefore it was easiest (and cheapest) to set up for the small scale prototypes we are building. (Which do however sometimes lead to scaled implementation)
Chose IBM Cloudant
In our case it was a no-brainer since we were using IBM Cloud. In comparison to DB2 the ease of use and JSON support was the key.
Chose IBM Cloudant
Infinitely better in every part. Except handling SQL
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant DB is backed by CouchDB and that too hosted on IBM Cloud is the key. Concurrency and durability is the key here. In-memory capabilities are non-existent on the IBM Cloudant DB.
Chose IBM Cloudant
We chose Cloudant because it was fully managed and used in the marketplace, unlike MongoDB was at the time, and it supported JSON which SQL Server 2016 didn't.
Chose IBM Cloudant
It's 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 …
Chose IBM Cloudant
All other NoSQL document-centric DB must be installed on premise on in the cloud as complicated clusters. The "as a service" formula and the open source origin were the same reasons for Cloudant choice, freeing us of all system and administration tasks!
Chose IBM Cloudant
Cloudant is a database as a service with a strong support team. The feature set is comparable to other solutions but not all are managed services, or have easy scalability, or can demonstrate production level reliability and performance.
Chose IBM Cloudant
We used to host CouchDB ourselves, but moved to BigCouch at first for scalability and then to Cloudant to reduce the maintenance overheads.
We use Elasticsearch alongside Cloudant these days, since _changes streams make it easy to feed data from Cloudant into Elasticsearch. …
Chose IBM Cloudant
Cloudant blows all of the other competitors out of the water. The robust UI, the scalability, the management console, these are all reasons why Cloudant is a superior product to any of these "competitors". Cloudant is head and shoulders above the rest. It was a pleasure to …
Chose IBM Cloudant
I've even worked with Cassandra, but I found Cloudant to be much simpler, easier, neat and efficient. Cassandra was not highly scalable but Cloudant was much efficient in it. Even the Monitoring and other scripts were pre-built which made it much time efficient for us.
Chose IBM Cloudant
I chose Cloudant because they had the best low end traffic prices while still providing room for pay as you need it scalability. I had an Amazon EC2 instance for a few years and I had to pay so much for it even though it hardly had any traffic. Being connected to IBM helped me …
Features
Apache CouchDBIBM Cloudant
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache CouchDB
7.9
Ratings
11% below category average
IBM Cloudant
9.1
Ratings
3% above category average
Performance8.00 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Availability8.50 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Concurrency8.50 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Security6.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Scalability8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data model flexibility7.00 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache CouchDBIBM Cloudant
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 8.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 8.1 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 8.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache CouchDBIBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache CouchDBIBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
It's good as a general JSON document store and basic map/reduce system. For more specialized tasks like message queuing, graph traversal, streaming metrics aggregation, or arbitrary table joins, I'd recommend another database.
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IBM Cloudant is the best implementation of CouchDB, or any NoSQL database that you could use if you are looking for a database that can handle extremely rapid writes to a database without having to worry about transactional integrity. IBM Cloudant also abstracts out CouchDB's replication/multi-node requirements and ensures high availability on its own. It also allows map-reduce based indexing which will allow massive databases to be aggregated and queried very quickly. It should not be used in cases where you require structured data which is organized according to a schema, or if you want to maintain ACID database properties.
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Pros
  • Ease of install and setup.
  • Ease of syncing with another database. This was truly set it and forget it.
  • The REST API to read data. No additional drivers are needed to work with CouchDB.
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  • 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.
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Cons
  • SUPER SLOW. We do tons of data and S3 and just using the file system were both way faster
  • Using views is too complex
  • Stores entire DB as 1 file, good luck when it becomes many TB
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  • To have a sort of LUW - Logical Unit Work when many documents are involved into a single update process. The changing of one document is related to its status information but it must be synchronized with all the other documents involved in the process.
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Likelihood to Renew
As a highly distributed database system, CouchDB naturally has strong high availability with traffic load-balancing capability. It is also easy to scale and replicate data in a cluster for redundancy. However, there is still some room for query performance improvement in the future.
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the flexibility of NoSQL allow us to modify and upgrade our apps very fast and in a convenient way. Having the solution hosted by IBM is also giving us the chance to focus on features and the improvement of our apps. It's one thing less to be worried about
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Usability
Couchdb is very simple to use and the features are also reduced but well implemented. In order to use it the way its designed, the ui is adequate and easy. Of course, there are some other task that can't be performed through the admin ui but the minimalistic design allows you to use external libraries to develop custom scripts
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It's mostly just a straight forward API to a data store. I knock one off for the full text search thing, but I don't need it much anyways. Also, the dashboard UI they give is pretty nice to use. It provides syntax-highlighting for writing views and queries are easy to test. I wish other DBs had a UI like this.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
it is a highly available solution in the IBM cloud portfolio and hence we have never had any issues with the data base being available - we also do continuous replication to be on the safer side just in case some thing goes awry. We also perform twice a year disaster recovery tests.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
very easy to get started and is very developer friendly given that it uses couchDB analytics. It is a cloud based solution and hence there is no hardware investment in a server and staging the server to get started and the associated delays/bureaucracy involved to get started. Good documentation is also available.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
online resources are good enough to understand but there is nothing like testing. In our case, we discovered some not documented behavior that we take in count now. Also, the experience in NodeJs is critical. Also, take in count that most of the "good practices" with cloudant are not in online courses but in blogs and pages from independent developers
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Implementation Rating
it support is minimal also hw requirements. Also for development, we can have databases replicated everywhere and the replication is automagical. once you set up the security and the rules for replication, you are ready to go. The absence of a model let you build your app the way you want it
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  • Test the architecture on CouchDB helped us to address initial design flaws.
  • The migration to Cloudant as such was very painless.
  • We have migrate our replication system to Cloudant Android Sync for mobile devices.
  • We have regular informal contact with the Cloudant leadership to discuss our use cases and implementation strategies.
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Alternatives Considered
Open Source, and freely able to install it on any OS you desire (the big 3, anyways) CouchDB was selected for that, it's early-adoption of JSON and its mobile-friendly environment. Also, I have used it off and on in various non-professional projects, and it was really one of the first exposure to databases in my career
Read full review
MongoDB Atlas and Azure Cosmos DB are the closest competitors we found with Cloudant, especially in terms of fixed pricing and having a GUI for easy viewing and quick edits of data. Cloudant's pricing model flat out beats MongoDB Atlas' in terms of how easy it would be to predict costs. Cosmos DB is a much closer competitor, as it integrates well with Azure's stack similarly to Cloudant and the rest of the IBM Cloud stack; similar [throughout]-based pricing and replication options; and even the GUI and ease of query using SQL, which my team and I were more familiar with. Where Cloudant beats out Cosmos DB is again having a more simple pricing model (ops/sec vs Cosmos' "request units" voodoo) and being based on open-source software assuaging fears of vendor lock-in.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
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.
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Return on Investment
  • Biggest impact on our business has been that CouchDB has been pretty invisible from a cost or issues perspective. It just works.
  • We use the Apache releases, so it's free. Of course there is a cost to "free" - we have invested time to become fluent in using and understanding CouchDB. But we feel the investment was well worth the effort and we have a solid, fundamental technology to our products that "just works".
  • There are some things we do - SaaS vs self-hosting - that have probably been kept simple by using CouchDB. Overall, we are extremely happy with CouchDB.
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  • Saving in-terms of cost of procuring and maintaining hardware, which will be realized over the next 5 years.
  • Positive ROI in terms of the number of FTEs involved in maintaining our databases; our DBAs can now focus on other important and business critical applications.
  • Best ROI in terms of our organization's vision - they are no longer anxious / nervous to move to the cloud. We are already on the CLOUD.
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