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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

(26-45 of 45)
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February 14, 2019

Cloudant Rocks!

Deepak Kaul | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Strong query interface, IBM Cloudant provides a very robust and flexible query interface allowing us to write simple as well as complex queries.
  • Performance, for the most part we have been happy with the performance of the Cloudant database
  • Simple and straight forward. Ability to roll out the instances quickly and with a simple interface has been important for us.
  • The shared instances of Cloudant can have better isolation mechanisms. We have had instances where the performance of our instance was negatively impacted because other instances on the same node were taking more resources.
  • Better conflict resolution. Cloudant should take away some complexity of conflict resolution from the application. Today the application has to manage most of that complexity.
Naresh Jasotani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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!!
  • Lacks in-memory capabilities
  • Limited support for programming languages like Python, R, Perl
  • No XML support
  • No SQL support :(
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • We had a small data mart project that required the storage of some rather highly connected data that also had a relatively small footprint. This made IBM Cloudant an obvious choice because we could store the data in a data structure that met our project need al while using a platform that our web development team understood and was comfortable with.
  • We had a bunch of geospatial data that we needed for analysis. Having GeoJSON being natively supported by Cloudant made it an easy choice.
  • Cloudant was cloud-based and didn't require a DBA support it, this allowed the project to move ahead without pushback from the infrastructure team.
  • 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.
Romualdo Gobbo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
  • Managing different documents in JSON format: every well formed structure of JSON docs are stored without a previous data schema support.
  • Queu reviews: are the power map-reduce functions applying after the documents ingestion.
  • Replication: powerful and easy DevOps function to save, copy or back up the data from one Cloudant DB to another in synchronizing way even between different sites geographically distributed.
  • The automatic creation of Data Warehouse relational DB DashDB for Analytics from NoSQL is one of the [most] invaluable features ever found. The SDP-Schema Discovery Process is really unleashing the power of JSON schema-less into structured relational DB ready for all analytic tools without any programming intervention.
  • The API GEO call based on GeoJSON structure, is one of the features that has been much more awaited in the "location awareness" application now implicit in quite all applications from marketing to logistics. The GEO API is built by the query options making the geo search application integration more easy than ever.
  • To have a sort of LUW - Logical Unit Work when many documents are involved into a single update process. The changing of one document is related to its status information but it must be synchronized with all the other documents involved in the process.
Justin Saul | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Cloudant is flexible and fast. From basic document storage, to aggregate data requests, to creating graph data models, Cloudant was flexible enough to handle it.
  • Cloudant events every record change enabling an easy way to event everything.
  • The Cloudant support team is fantastic.
  • At the time, filtered replication is sub-optimal for large data sets. This will improve over time.
  • The divide (cost & performance) from tenant to dedicated is a bit wide for startups.
Carlos Eduardo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Cloudant is cloud. Through Cloudant our company was able to connect all of our services into a single database in a very easy and faster way. This made our maintenance and analysis about our services much easier.
  • Cloudant is elastic. This is very important in business today. We spend only what we really need and have used. Nothing more.
  • Cloudant is very easy. Our company was able to connect Cloudant with all of our services and apps very easily. In a few weeks Cloudant was completely integrated to our services.
  • Our company team is completely integrated with Cloudant. The service is great and any new feature will be welcome.
August 01, 2016

Short and sweet

Kris Bandurski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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).
Bryan Redeagle | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The indexing is fast.
  • Our data is safe there, we rarely have problems accessing or requesting the data.
  • One great thing is that we can address different boolean functions in our queries.
  • The ability to talk to the database through web services is great.
  • The analytic reports about the use of the database needs improvements.
  • A year or 6 months reports for the post/get hits will be great add.
Denis Voloshko | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Scales well.
  • Full access via http is great!
  • I personally like replication to vanilla CouchDB to use it locally from time to time.
  • Downloading data from Cloudant is a pain. Feplication via http is slow.
  • I would add the ability to use external functions for Cloudant, as it's implemented in CouchDB.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Wide array of client-side libraries (Android, iPhone, Java PHP, JavaScript to name a few) provided by Cloudant make development easier and streamlined.
  • It is not JUST a DB - Ability to write JavaScript code on the Cloudant server makes it function as a web service provider along with a DB.
  • Cloudant is a true DBaaS provider. It is as close to one-click setup as it can be, and deployments take almost no time.
  • Cloudant provides bidirectional data replication
  • REST APIs
  • Per-document read privileges would be nice
  • Content Push - It would be good to see an in-built feature where a pool of clients can be linked to one or more documents so every time a document changes, the pool of clients linked to that document are notified of changes.
  • Provide a few templates for creating Filters on the DB.
January 04, 2016

Cloudant, great for ACRA

Miguel Angel Merino Vega | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Documentation. You really do well in that.
  • Reliability. We think IBM cloudant makes us feel secure with our data, we manage sensible information that we don't want to be open to the world.
  • Time. Everything can be done quickly. No too many configuration steps. The Cloudant API just works
  • Lack of a local version. We have to use alternatives as CouchDB or pouchdb.
  • The integration with other nosql databases should be easier.
  • Official wrappers for languages like python. That would be very useful.
January 04, 2016

Cloudant DBaaS review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • DBaaS means there is no need to deploy your own servers, which saves you the initial investment on hardwares.
  • Cloudant uses JSON as storage data format, which is commonly supported by all languages. As a result, no cost on data conversion.
  • Owing to the relationship between Cloudant and IBM, they can always get the best support and discounts for customers. For example, choosing Cloudant single tenant plan with hosting at Softlayer, there will be some discounts for you.
  • The single tenant plan seems to be expensive for some SMEs - data size may not reach the half of its minimum storage size, however, multi-tenant makes them feel unsafe for their business information.
  • The query language is not friendly for developers who are just moved from the SQL (MySQL, MSSQL...etc). It requires totally different skills.
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