IBM Cloudant vs. Riak

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 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
Riak
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.N/A
Pricing
IBM CloudantRiak
Editions & Modules
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM CloudantRiak
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM CloudantRiak
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloudant
Chose IBM Cloudant
The technology behind Cloudant (BigCouch) is no better or worse than any of these. They are all good for different reasons. What makes Cloudant my choice against them is the hosted portion. These are all just databases that I would have to manage. Cloudant is managed for me, …
Riak

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM CloudantRiak
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloudant
9.4
21 Ratings
7% above category average
Riak
9.4
2 Ratings
7% above category average
Performance9.821 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Availability8.121 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Concurrency9.921 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Security9.821 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Scalability9.121 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Data model flexibility9.921 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility9.121 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM CloudantRiak
Small Businesses
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM CloudantRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(45 ratings)
9.0
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(4 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.5
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.6
(23 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM CloudantRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Basho Technologies
Riak is well suited to applications such as:
Transaction logging e.g. financial transactions and/or exchange rates.
Storing time series data, especially IoT.
Storing massive amounts of data e.g. corporation wide backups, data lakes etc.
A fully s3 compatible replacement for Amazon S3 ensuring data privacy.
Riak is not as well suited to:
Traditional RDBMS functions, especially those that join the outputs of one or more queries together to produce the desired result.
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Pros
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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Basho Technologies
  • Highly available: If nodes go offline for any reason, the system still operates.
  • Highly scalable: There is a minimum of 5 nodes, which can handle a lot by themselves. When scaling is required, it can be done easily, with minimal to no downtime on large scales.
  • Very fast searching: Riak has SOLR indexing built-into the core product, which makes querying for data very fast.
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Cons
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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Basho Technologies
  • Deletes!!! We've seen on numerous occasions where Riak has "resurrected" deleted data. We've worked with Basho numerous times and tried multiple changes to the way we interact with Riak to prevent the problem but it still remains. The deletes seem to reappear weeks, even months, after the delete was issued. We've had to work around this issue by providing a "deleted" flag for all data objects stored in Riak. Thus, we do no delete but simply flip the flag. Excess baggage we would really like to not have to worry about.
  • Search. Currently there's no way to tell what data you have in Riak without already knowing a particular bucket/key. There is a way to list the keys for a given bucket but due to performance implications, this is not a viable method to lookup data. Especially when you have a large amount of keys in the bucket.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Basho Technologies
Right now, I'm on a project where we need databases that can run on embedded systems. Riak isn't necessarily the best fit for that scenario. But when we need a clustered database, that's where we'd start considering Riak.
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Usability
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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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
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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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Performance
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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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Basho Technologies
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.
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Online Training
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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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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Basho Technologies
Because of the RESTful HTTP interface, the consistency model, and because of the catalog-driven data model, Riak was an easy win over Redis and Memcached.
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Scalability
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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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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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Basho Technologies
  • Riak has been a key part of our company's build process for our client's search backend. It is valuable for is in that it provides a reliable way to view the current search index.
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ScreenShots