Apache HBase vs. IBM Cloudant

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HBase
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.N/A
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 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 HBaseIBM 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
HBaseIBM Cloudant
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
Apache HBaseIBM Cloudant
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache HBase
7.7
5 Ratings
13% below category average
IBM Cloudant
9.4
21 Ratings
7% above category average
Performance7.15 Ratings9.821 Ratings
Availability7.85 Ratings8.121 Ratings
Concurrency7.05 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Security7.85 Ratings9.821 Ratings
Scalability8.65 Ratings9.121 Ratings
Data model flexibility7.15 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility8.25 Ratings9.121 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache HBaseIBM Cloudant
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache HBaseIBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(10 ratings)
8.1
(45 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(10 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(5 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(23 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache HBaseIBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache
Hbase is well suited for large organizations with millions of operations performing on tables, real-time lookup of records in a table, range queries, random reads and writes and online analytics operations. Hbase cannot be replaced for traditional databases as it cannot support all the features, CPU and memory intensive. Observed increased latency when using with MapReduce job joins.
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IBM
Our organization found Cloudant most suitable if One, a fixed pricing structure would make the most sense, for example in a situation where the project Cloudant is being used in makes its revenue in procurement or fixed retainer — thus the predictability of costs is paramount; Two, where you need to frequently edit the data and/or share access to the query engine to non-engineers — this is where the GUI shines.
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Pros
Apache
  • Scalability. HBase can scale to trillions of records.
  • Fast. HBase is extremely fast to scan values or retrieve individual records by key.
  • HBase can be accessed by standard SQL via Apache Phoenix.
  • Integrated. I can easily store and retrieve data from HBase using Apache Spark.
  • It is easy to set up DR and backups.
  • Ingest. It is easy to ingest data into HBase via shell, Java, Apache NiFi, Storm, Spark, Flink, Python and other means.
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IBM
  • For us, performance and scalability is the key, and Cloudant DB backed by CouchDB is scalable and performant.
  • IBM Cloudant dB is very easy to provision for sandbox, development, QA as well as production.
  • Support for Java for CouchDB app server analytics enables a greater control for over developers.
  • Schema free oriented very easy to program and build applications on it.
  • We love it!!
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Cons
Apache
  • There are very few commands in HBase.
  • Stored procedures functionality is not available so it should be implemented.
  • HBase is CPU and Memory intensive with large sequential input or output access while as Map Reduce jobs are primarily input or output bound with fixed memory. HBase integrated with Map-reduce jobs will result in random latencies.
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IBM
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Apache
There's really not anything else out there that I've seen comparable for my use cases. HBase has never proven me wrong. Some companies align their whole business on HBase and are moving all of their infrastructure from other database engines to HBase. It's also open source and has a very collaborative community.
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IBM
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
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
  • 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
Apache
Cassandra os great for writes. But with large datasets, depending, not as great as HBASE. Cassandra does support parquet now. HBase still performance issues. Cassandra has use cases of being used as time series. HBase, it fails miserably. GeoSpatial data, Hbase does work to an extent. HA between the two are almost the same.
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IBM
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, it's very comparable to MongoDB as a DBaaS offer, available globally and with great documentation.
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Scalability
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
Apache
  • As Hbase is a noSql database, here we don't have transaction support and we cannot do many operations on the data.
  • Not having the feature of primary or a composite primary key is an issue as the architecture to be defined cannot be the same legacy type. Also the transaction concept is not applicable here.
  • The way data is printed on console is not so user-friendly. So we had to use some abstraction over HBase (eg apache phoenix) which means there is one new component to handle.
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IBM
  • IBM Cloudant is very secure and we never have to worry about losing data/unauthorized access
  • It is one of the best data backup system and works well
  • Global availability means it is easy to connect to the nearest data center and this reduces load time which is great.
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