Couchbase Server vs. Riak

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Couchbase Server
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Couchbase Server is a cloud-native, distributed database that fuses the strengths of relational databases such as SQL and ACID transactions with JSON flexibility and scale that defines NoSQL. It is available as a service in commercial clouds and supports hybrid and private cloud deployments.N/A
Riak
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.N/A
Pricing
Couchbase ServerRiak
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Couchbase ServerRiak
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Couchbase ServerRiak
Considered Both Products
Couchbase Server
Chose Couchbase Server
  • All the selected products above are free but don't have peer to peer syncing cloud to mobile.
  • The GUI for maintaining and clustering the DB is wonderful.
  • We can use community release for the mobile app.
Chose Couchbase Server
We looked at several different SQL and NoSQL systems. Most were either too expensive, didn't provide the needed functionality, or were too hard to use with the size of our team. We ultimately went with Couchbase because of its performance, horizontal scalability, and price.
Riak

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Couchbase ServerRiak
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Couchbase Server
8.9
97 Ratings
1% above category average
Riak
9.4
2 Ratings
7% above category average
Performance8.897 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Availability9.396 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Concurrency8.894 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Security8.994 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Scalability9.295 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Data model flexibility8.995 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility8.194 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Couchbase ServerRiak
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Couchbase ServerRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(100 ratings)
9.0
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
2.1
(3 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(95 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(51 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Couchbase ServerRiak
Likelihood to Recommend
Couchbase
Best suited when edge devices have interrupted internet connection. And Couchbase provides reliable data transfer. If used for attachment Couchbase has a very poor offering. A hard limit of 20 MB is not okay. They have the best conflict resolution but not so great query language on Couchbase lite.
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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
Couchbase
  • Couchbase performance is exceptional both for in-memory and persisted transactions.
  • Handling of node failures and cluster rebalancing (high availability).
  • Enterprise support from Couchbase themselves
  • Good documentation
  • Streaming of bucket (database) level mutations via their Database Change Protocol (DCP).
  • Replication of datasets between native clients and Couchbase buckets
  • Handling of simultaneous writes to the same record with performance penalties
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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
Couchbase
  • The N1QL engine performs poorly compared to SQL engines due to the number of interactions needed, so if your use case involves the need for a lot of SQL-like query activity as opposed to the direct fetch of data in the form of a key/value map you may want to consider a RDBMS that has support for json data types so that you can more easily mix the use of relational and non-relational approaches to data access.
  • You have to be careful when using multiple capabilities (e.g. transactions with Sync Gateway) as you will typically run into problems where one technology may not operate correctly in combination with another.
  • There are quality problems with some newly released features, so be careful with being an early adopter unless you really need the capability. We somewhat desperately adopted the use of transactions, but went through multiple bughunt cycles with Couchbase working the kinks out.
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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
Couchbase
I rarely actually use Couchbase Server, I just stay up-to-date with the features that it provides. However, when the need arises for a NoSQL datastore, then I will strongly consider it as an option
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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
Couchbase
Couchbase has been quite a usable for our implementation. We had similar experience with our previous "trial" implementation, however it was short lived.
Couchbase has so far exceeded expectation. Our implementation team is more confident than ever before.
When we are Live for more than 6 months, I'm hoping to enhance this rating.
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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Performance
Couchbase
One of Couchbase’s greatest assets is its performance with large datasets. Properly set up with well-sized clusters, it is also highly reliable and scalable. User management could be better though, and security often feels like an afterthought. Couchbase has improved tremendously since we started using it, so I am sure that these issues will be ironed out.
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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Couchbase
I haven't had many opportunities to request support, I will look forward to better the rating. We have technical development and integration team who reach out directly to TAM at Couchbase.
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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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Alternatives Considered
Couchbase
The Apache Cassandra was one type of product used in our company for a couple of use-cases. The Aerospike is something we [analyzed] not so long time ago as an interesting alternative, due to its performance characteristics. The Oracle Coherence was and is still being used for [the] distributed caching use-case, but it will be replaced eventually by Couchbase. Though each of these products [has] its own strengths and weaknesses, we prefer sticking to Couchbase because of [the] experience we have with this product and because it is cost-effective for our organization.
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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
Couchbase
So far, the way that we mange and upgrade our clusters has be very smooth. It works like a dream when we use it in concert with AWS and their EC2 machines. Having access to powerful instances along side the Couchbase interface is amazing and allows us to do rebalances or maintenance without a worry
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Basho Technologies
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Couchbase
  • Great performance.
  • Leading Couchbase Lite capabilities for mobile use.
  • Developers' learning curve with replica reads and multi cluster can be long. Needs guidance and nurturing.
  • Cluster maintenance during OS patching, etc. has multiple ways to approach. Operational teams may need some guidance.
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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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