Apache CouchDB vs. Riak

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.

Incentivized

Riak is very good if you need a resilient data store that can handle large amounts of documents very fast. If you have 1,000,000 documents and need to execute complex queries, it is great. Riak's SOLR engine is fast, however if you have extremely high amount of queries in a very limited time range, it can fail in a bad way.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Reliability -- we rarely have to do anything to maintain our Riak instance. It is just online and available for whatever we throw at it.
• The Riak Python client is an excellent tool and handles parallel writes/reads very well
• There is a large and very receptive community or Riak users and developers who seem to be able to help with most technical questions that have arisen.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Missing a free text search function
• More security work
• Multi-tenant reporting
• More types of index optimised for different structures
• Automating repairs especially after unclean shutdowns
• WebDAV/Samba shares for Riak CS
• Implementing the SQL queries from Riak TS in Riak KV
• Settable replication bandwidth caps
• Safemode start up after failure
• More client integrations

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.

Incentivized

Riak works great for our use case but the fact that deletes seem to resurrect is a real issue for us. Unless we can get this solved, we'll continue to look at other products to see if our use case fits. Otherwise Riak is a great product and it fits our use case 95%. We have found work arounds to the remaining 5%.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Despite Basho going bankrupt and the project becoming fully open-source, community support is reasonably good, albeit a little slow at times. Paid enterprise-grade support is also available from former Basho engineers but the same company also contributes to the community support for free for basic questions or specific knowledge areas.

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

MongoDB seems to have copied a lot of functionality from Riak. This may be because MongoDB hired a number of former Basho engineers when Basho went bankrupt. That said, the new functions added to Riak after it became open source have successfully differentiated itself from MongoDB.

Amazon S3 is a nice tool but when you are at significant scale with regionally specific data (joys of GDPR), it's much easier to keep it in house and Riak CS lets you do exactly that. All you need to do is point your application at Riak CS instead of Amazon S3 and it just works as if nothing has changed.

When we evaluated against Cassandra, we found the tools available did not match our needs at the time.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Riak's simple API and simple management model made it a no brainer when it came to adopting it as a technology for the team.

Incentivized