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IBM Cloudant

IBM Cloudant

Overview

What is IBM Cloudant?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Win-Win for IBM Cloud

9 out of 10
April 18, 2021
Incentivized
We were using IBM Cloudant as our cloud storage platform for a project where we were collecting real-time environmental data. Later, we …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 7 features
  • Concurrency (21)
    9.9
    99%
  • Performance (21)
    9.8
    98%
  • Security (21)
    9.8
    98%
  • Availability (21)
    8.1
    81%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Standard

$1

Cloud
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB

Standard

$75

Cloud
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second

Lite

Free

Cloud
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant/pric…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases are designed to be used across large distrusted systems. They are notably much more scalable and much faster and handling very large data loads than traditional relational databases.

9.4
Avg 8.8
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Product Details

What is IBM Cloudant?

IBM Cloudant is a distributed database that is optimized for handling heavy workloads that are typical of large, fast-growing web and mobile apps. Available as an SLA-backed, fully managed IBM Cloud service, Cloudant elastically scales throughput and storage independently. Cloudant is also available as a downloadable on-premises installation, and its API and replication protocol are compatible with an open source ecosystem that includes CouchDB, PouchDB and libraries for the most popular web and mobile development stacks.

IBM Cloudant Features

NoSQL Databases Features

  • Supported: Performance
  • Supported: Availability
  • Supported: Concurrency
  • Supported: Security
  • Supported: Scalability
  • Supported: Data model flexibility
  • Supported: Deployment model flexibility

IBM Cloudant Video

database management with Cloudant

IBM Cloudant Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional

Frequently Asked Questions

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 considered part of a new generation of 'NoSQL' databases that don't require fixed table schemas and is challenging the dominance of traditional relational databases (including the popular MySQL).

Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, and Couchbase Server are common alternatives for IBM Cloudant.

Reviewers rate Concurrency and Data model flexibility highest, with a score of 9.9.

The most common users of IBM Cloudant are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(123)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Nicolas Peeters | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloudant allows us to scale our data layer without worrying about the operations side of things to manage such a big cluster. Cloudant is the main database system for our company. It's business critical for our company and our many customers rely on its performance on a daily basis to perform their activities.
  • Scale your data layer without issues.
  • Great support team.
  • Very few operational problems
  • No detailed monitoring (which views are used or not, performance metrics) on top of the basic stuff provided by CouchDB
  • No playground environment to test some very large map/reduce queries (and therefore any changes in the design have to reindex the whole DB).
  • Pricing is quite steep
  • No integrated backup features, as you'd expect from an enterprise product
It is less suited for reporting. Reporting is an issue. This is a general issue with document-based NoSQL systems, but there's no real solution provided by IBM for this (apart from "dump to a SQL database"). It's very well suited for a document-based system and we of course rely very much on the replication capabilities.
NoSQL Databases (7)
82.85714285714286%
8.3
Performance
80%
8.0
Availability
90%
9.0
Concurrency
90%
9.0
Security
60%
6.0
Scalability
90%
9.0
Data model flexibility
100%
10.0
Deployment model flexibility
70%
7.0
  • Ability to quickly scale and launch a new tenant on the system
Actually, none. Since we rely on Cloudant.
  • 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.
Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.
10
- Developers
- Operations
We don't have any engineering working specifically on the support. Of course some of the developers are involved with Cloudant on a day-to-day basis.
Skills required:
- JSON
- Javascript (views), we use nano for the Node.js parts of the application
- Map/reduce concepts
- Document design.
- Java (we use Ektorp for the Java parts of the application)
  • Storing the business transactions performed offline
  • Storing usage metrics
  • Storing content configuration documents
  • Reporting on all of the above.
  • Distributed replications
  • Waiting on some really cool use cases for DashDB.
  • More reporting with DashDB.
  • More ad-hoc reporting.
  • Much more storage of data.
  • Automatic archiving of the database (e.g. like Amazon Glacier) would be a killer feature.
No
  • Product Features
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Features, since we rely on CouchDB's interface. But also the gold support contract that gives us peace of mind and a dedicated support engineer in case of questions. We have been very happy with the support provided to our team.
No, we are happy with the service. The selection process was very simple since we were already using Cloudant through the Heroku connector (which was unexpectedly terminated, to be honest).
  • Online training
Cloudant Learning Center is part of our employee training (basic) https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant?topic=Cloudant-learning-center
There are limited options available to the user (by design)
When you create a database, you can configure the number of internal shards.
Cloudant support can help with the advanced settings if needed.
- Avoid as much as possible the Cloudant Search
- Avoid large documents (prefer a lot of small documents).
- Use UUID as _id whenever possible to avoid naming conflicts (especially in distributed environments where you don't control this).
- Learn to write efficient views (instead of search)
- Learn about handling the 429 error code!
- You don't need to have replication of the data on 8 nodes by default (check out the Q parameter)
No - there is no facility to customize the interface
No - the product does not support adding custom code
Everything can be driven by API requests (even stuff like scheduling, creation of custom shards type), it's very rich and well documented.
  • Editing the docs in the dashboard
  • Writing ad-hoc queries
  • Permissions management
  • The Dashboard is slow and takes time to load many databases.
  • Writing a new map/reduce view indexes the entire DB for every change. In Couchbase, you have a feature to create a view for a subset of the data, this is very convenient.
Because it's very intuitive, if you a familiar with the core CouchDB concepts.
In general, Cloudant feels very stable with large volumes of data (specifically with the multi-tenant setup). It allows us to scale our growth in the terms of transactions (summer months in our operation) without too many headaches.

- Pure response time speed is actually something to be improved.
- The performance of the Dashboard (especially with a lot of databases) needs improvement.

There are a few cases where we noticed issues: some replication jobs were not properly triggered (this is a long standing issue that we are dealing with with the support team).
IBM Cloud Sales has been working with us to create an adequate pricing for the usage that we have which corresponds and scales with our growth. It's also not very aggressive and sales-y which is great.
CSM have also been helpful at times.
Also good support from the Sales team in terms of renewal and changing our subscription and support plans.
Monthly spending credits were slightly discounted compared to base list price.
N/A
Yes
We have a gold support contract.
Yes
Yes, some deployments done a few months ago were related to some issues we raised.
Our account contact director Chris Snow is helping us to develop some extensions to Cloudant Sync during his free time.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
We designed the system around the CouchDB architecture, so this was always part of the implementation since day one. Cloudant actually provided the "service" around the CouchDB technology.
  • Designing the documents to be scalable.
  • (Manually) sharding of the document on many databases was a key design decision for us (we shard per "day"), so that we can more replicate back and forth.
  • Designing performing views for large amounts of document (ad-hoc reporting) is very tricky.
August 29, 2019

Best for mobile

Victor Pease Solano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloudant is the database for all our mobile applications with offline-first architecture, and it's the best option to keep everything synced and secure.

This is the best way to use CouchDB, because Cloudant adds the authorization layer required for a real live app, and also the infinite capacity with the flexibility to grow from $0 to whatever is required according to the amount of users you need to support.

Also, we have now using Cloudant as the main database for data capture apps and the source for all our catalogs in order to free resources from our rdbms system.

Finally, considering CouchDB is part of Bluemix, you will have the chance to grow, adding on more services for your app.
  • Authentication improved with the API keys
  • Synchronization with https, which means secure and trustable syncs
  • Scale in a transparent way
  • Free start with the $50 allowance makes Cloudant the best way to start
  • It would be nice to have a way to import bulk data
  • There must be a better way to check usage. There are a lot of transactions not shown in the actual report
  • There must be a way to reset a db -- a way to set the actual data as the base and eliminate all deleted docs
Cloudant is best suited for offline first apps, with a library on the client -- you can have a completely synced environment in no time with data isolation per user and everything.

It is not so good for report apps or to handle too much structured data, because the Cloudant query can turn in something tricky, specially if your data model gets complicated.
  • Positive: you can start your app at 0$ cost. After that, you can combine Cloud data with local Couchdb servers for heavy operations as export to RDBMS
  • Negative: moving from lite to standard pricing plan requires to restart your app
Cloudant is a hosted solution so it works better for me. Also, it includes a better authentication layer than CouchDB.
As for Couchbase, it has membase but the hosted options are much more expensive.
In the SQL world, I tried several sync solutions but the configuration and flow is not as smooth as the built-in capability in Cloudant.
50
this is a way to say that almost everybody use Cloudant in some way inside the organization.
Direct use is just for developers, who integrate their services in our applications that most of the time are combined with Couchdb/PouchDb on the edge in order to control the cloud usage and gain Offline first in our apps.
Indirect use, are all of our internal users because they use an app with cloudant services inside
2
In order to support Cloudant, we have people with HTTP protocol understanding, JavaScript and NodeJS. They work with the network team in order to check firewall rules that is the most common problem that we face.
NodeJS because they need to understand and modify the scripts to load info to Cloudant. And finally javascript just to maintain views
  • Catalog server. All "combos" and list in apps are calling data from a Cloudant/PouchDb
  • Data capture database. Apps for data input, use Cloudant/Pouchdb as the first storage server
  • data segmentation. Some apps access only to the data they need
  • Data Capture, because Cloudant write operations are faster. After that, we use the /changes feed to get the info back to our RDBMS
  • As a Cache, kind of distributed redis service in order to free up resources in our main rdbms server
  • we combine Cloudant and couchdb/pouchdb in order to minimize the use of cloud services, mainly for /changes feed access
  • Cloudant partitioned will allow us to consolidate several Dbs in one
  • search indexes is something we are evaluating
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.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
phase 0: data modeling, using the db as a key-value repository
phase 1: synchronization scripts, configuring how to transfer data to the client
phase 2: secondary indexes, setting new ways to query the data using map/reduce mechanism
phase 3: cloudant query, ease complicated queries using this kind of indexes
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
Git is a critical component on your development when using NoSQL because data structure and rules are no longer in your server. The best way is to declare a global library to handle data objects across all your apps and reuse them to save time and ensure data rules
  • Data rules must be well coordinated between several components to avoid data inconsistency
  • Synchronization rules must be tested "out" because there is nothing like a sandbox
The performance and cost are both over our expectations
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
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.
Yes, Cloudant is easy to understand without trainning. This is the suggested approach to start. The formal trainning will give you the order how to proceed with your project. Anyway, consider not just the formal education. There are a lot of projects and examples how to use Cloudant not just in lab environments that you can use as is and then modify to your needs.
  • replication
  • data browsing
  • query via http interfase
  • security settings on database
  • filtered replication rules
  • data events rules
No
cloudant adds some features to improve security and data query like tokens and cloudant query that really adds a lot of power to these features over the standard CouchDB. also you can integrate your data into a relational schema using ibm dashdb for data analysis. everything is in the right place
Because of the offline-first architecture, most of the transactions are handled on the client, requiring less power on the server. Also, because it's plain http, the overload on the client is almost nothing.

Cost and performance is in balance using Cloudant as a backend compared with other hosted solutions.
August 01, 2016

Short and sweet

Kris Bandurski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's our primary store for user-generated and transactional data.
  • Scalability.
  • Fast ingest rates.
  • Fault tolerance.
  • Great for building data pipelines (_changes streams).
  • I'd like to have an option of specifying a view (or multiple views) for the _changes stream that will be used to process the documents returned alongside changes (with include_docs=true)
  • Database-specific monitoring dashboards would be great.
  • Ability to tweak job priorities (on dedicated clusters).
Great when the primary objective is reliable and quick data storage. Not ideal for applications that require running complex, relational queries.
We had our cluster scaled out for a promotion that involved a huge increase in write requests. The important thing there is that by scaling out, i.e., having additional nodes spun up, we increased the cluster's processing power and ingest capacity without any downtime.
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. Cloudant's search engine works well, but Elasticsearch makes it easier to visualise data through Kibana.




Yes
BigCouch, which is the open-source distributed CouchDB. We used to host it ourselves, but we decided to switch to Cloudant's DBaaS to reduce maintenance overheads.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
Although CouchDB (and it's distributed version BigCouch) are fairly easy to maintain under moderate load, running them in heavy-traffic production environment requires specialist knowledge that the Cloudant team definitely have. We wanted to sleep more - and now we do!
We wouldn't change a thing.
Quick response times, knowledgable and helpful support staff.
No
  • Building data pipelines.
  • Map-reduce.
  • Search.
  • Monitoring the activity of each database (as opposed to the whole cluster).
  • Accessing shared databases via the dashboard (some features need improving).
  • Tracking the progress of indexing jobs could be easier, some kind of a progress bar would be useful.
Overall, the tool is very pleasant and easy to work with, monitoring could be a bit more detailed, but I'm sure the Cloudant team will get there!
Bryan Redeagle | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Cloudant to store call detail records for our faxing platform. The platform itself stores these records, but the API is not easy to query. So we take every single record and store them in Cloudant. This includes not only the basic sender and receiver information, but also per minute costs for each fax. This allows us to easily present incoming and outgoing faxes to our users via our client portal. It's also great for the billing department in that they can quickly query the recordings for profit and cost analysis.
  • It stores a very large amount of information very efficiently. Granted, we're just storing call detail records, but we're storing 200K records in 50MB.
  • Querying isn't as fancy as SQL-based databases. But if you know what you need and can get it in a view, it is very fast. I'm querying both date and phone number without any issues.
  • The UI for managing your databases is top notch. We can build views and searches, and query those with issues. This lets us refine and perfect our JS functions and queries very easily.
  • Search Queries. They work when they work, but some of the documentation is a tad confusing and the bookmark system of pagination is not great.
It's great for storing large datasets where you need to access records directly or can sort them into easily parseable lists. It's not good for complex queries. Don't think of it as a complete replacement for SQL. It fits certain needs, and SQL-like expression is not that.
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, and still runs the queries I need.
Views and Keys can do a lot if you're clever about what information you need to check.
Simple. It has yet to fail me. I've had almost no experience with support staff due to it's reliability.
5
They don't realize they are using it. They are not developing with Cloudant, but instead it's being used as their back end. It's used mainly for Call Detail Record and billing storage for a faxing server. As faxing occurs on the server, the details are sent to Cloudant. This allows us to more quickly query and parse the data. Using three views I can pull up incoming andoutgoing faxes and billing information for each number. So our clients use it to look at their faxes, our employees use it for support, and our accounting staff uses it for billing.
1
It's not difficult. Any web developer should be able to get going with it. It takes some knowledge in JS, APIs, JSON, and how Cloudant stores and queries for information. You should start by knowing the first three. The last one can be figured out using Cloudant's documentation (which is pretty thorough. The most difficult part for many developers I think would be throwing out the SQL way of doing things. That doesn't work here. You need to think like a document database.
  • Call Detail Record Storage
  • Billing Data Storage
  • Faxing Data
  • I use complex keys with Cloudant views to query not just CDRs by phone, but by date as well. Range queries on views are great!
  • I would really like to integrate it with InfluxDB and some monitoring software to create a more performant and efficient monitoring platform. Many software out there like to use ElasticSearch, but ElasticSearch is very costly resource-wise.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
It was the features. I needed to store a lot of data quickly, and be able to query it without bringing down a server.
I would not change a thing. The core problem arose when querying for fax data would bring down our client portal on every single load. The fax server just refused to cooperate. Then and now, there are few products that would do what I need for little upfront costs. Most would require that I self-host, which I do not have time for.
  • It does what it says on the box. Stores data, retrieves data, queries data with Map/Reduce and full text search.
  • Full text search can be really tricky to get working correctly. It works, but then you find it's not quite querying the way you expect it.
Yes, but I don't use it
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.
I'm storing 200K records, and a query takes millimseconds. I've never had timeout issues in our Client portal where we pull the information. I haven't taken benchmarks, but perceptually I've noticed no slowness. I've thought about future scaling, but With no slowness already I'm wondering if I'll even see any.
No
I have yet to need it. In fact, I've contacted support once. I don't even think it was because of something they've done. Cloudant is reliable enough that I honestly don't think about it's status most of the time. In fact, any time my product stops working it's never been related to Cloudant.
No
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
Most of the company didn't notice a change. This was a brand new tool being built for a brand new service. The support team is used to changing how they work so they grabbed hold and moved on.
  • Getting queries working correctly. I was new to how views worked so I went down the full text path only to find it didn't quite worked out how I thought. Then I realize that phone numbers are just long number and went that route with ranged keys on views.
January 04, 2016

Cloudant, great for ACRA

Miguel Angel Merino Vega | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We decided to use Cloudant to implement an error handling database using ACRA on our Android Applications. First we tested it with a new application; after our first experience we decided to use it across all developments.

We needed a repository suited for ACRA to alert on any crashes our applications could experience. We looked for information and Cloudant's name appeared.
  • Fair cost and possibility to stay on free usage program.
  • High availability. Our databases never ever experienced falls.
  • Fair documentation access. We could find tutorials across the web.
  • The learning curve could be a little tough if used for first time.
  • UI could be redundant and unintuitive in some cases (at least about 1 year ago).
  • Little integration with other tools
Scenarios for the best use of Cloudant in our opinion are:
* Error handling logs.
* Spacial log database.
* Audit logs.
* Chats and social databases.
If you need a cloud repository for anything, Cloudant will be there for you. You could ease the burden of your main database and use Cloudant for these use cases.
It never drops our error management logs.
We looked for alternatives but the best documented and well presented tool was Cloudant for our use case.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Web Services
  • Creating databases
  • Integrate with external tools (services)
  • Managing users.
  • Replication. We need to get the concept first.
The documentation from third parties and tutorials are great but inside, the tool could use more information in order to lighten up the learning curve.
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