Apache CouchDB vs. Couchbase Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CouchDB
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Apache CouchDB is an HTTP + JSON document database with Map Reduce views and bi-directional replication. The Couch Replication Protocol is implemented in a variety of projects and products that span computing environments from globally distributed server-clusters, over mobile phones to web browsers.N/A
Couchbase Server
Score 8.7 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
Pricing
Apache CouchDBCouchbase Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CouchDBCouchbase Server
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache CouchDBCouchbase Server
Considered Both Products
CouchDB
Chose CouchDB
Open Source, and freely able to install it on any OS you desire (the big 3, anyways) CouchDB was selected for that, it's early-adoption of JSON and its mobile-friendly environment. Also, I have used it off and on in various non-professional projects, and it was really one of …
Chose CouchDB
Compared to MongoDB, CouchDB's Map-Reduce paradigm poses a steeper learning curve for SQL users. However, CouchDB's master-master replication is an advantage of implementing a load-balanced solution.
Even though, currently, CouchDB has strong community support, as an open …
Chose CouchDB
MongoDB and CouchDB are both document stores, but their concurrency models and ability to scale are very different. MongoDB cannot replicate / shard over unreliable links and network partitions have been the cause of data loss in the past. MongoDB has an easier query language …
Chose CouchDB
It has been 5+ years since we chose CouchDB. We looked an MongoDB, Cassandra, and probably some others. At the end of the day, the performance, power potential, and simplicity of CouchDB made it a simple choice for our needs. No one should use just because we did. As I said …
Chose CouchDB
S3 blew this out of the water, we can get over 30 files a second, almost no failures, auto backed up, don't need our own server, and a much simpler interface with PHP Laravel.
Chose CouchDB
We looked at MongoDB and Firebase. MongoDB gives us the best working db engine with a very intuitive design. However, it does not work as well offline. Firebase was extremely hard to create searching and indexing. Using a third-party to search didn't work for us or at least it …
Chose CouchDB
Developing spring boot apps with Couchbase using Spring Data JPA really solves complexity of programming.
Chose CouchDB
I have briefly used MongoDB in other products, and it proved that it had better integration capabilities with Ruby on Rails and node.js software platforms, more than CouchDB. But I never had the chance to actually replace CouchDB with MongoDB in the current product to see what …
Chose CouchDB
It stacks up well against Mongo DB. Mongo DB definitely has more marketing and developer and customer mindshare because it is so widely known.
Chose CouchDB
CouchbaseDB is essentially faster with more options but of course with a cost. Cloudant is the hosted option with a better security schema.
Couchbase Server
Chose Couchbase Server
It is optimized for interactive applications
Chose Couchbase Server
The project we are developing with Couchbase, was very inconsistent for few years of the beginning. We had to change data model multiple times. We knew this before starting the project. So we had to choose a NoSQL solution. We also wanted a syncing solution. After some research …
Chose Couchbase Server
I was not involved in the process of evaluating other products.
Chose Couchbase Server
Google Cloud Spanner meant "vendor lock-in". Yugabyte was pre-mature for us at the time. MySQL was not meant for the size of our data.
Chose Couchbase Server
Couchbase was mainly selected because it provided professional support, which was mandatory. I did not participate in the technical decisions.
Chose Couchbase Server
We have not used any other product like Couchbase
Chose Couchbase Server
Couchbase offers p2p sync and offline sync capabilities which gave an advantage over mongo. The sync has filter functions.
Chose Couchbase Server
Every data storage has it's own application domain. We use it in parallel
Chose Couchbase Server
Couchbase is scalable and very secure. It also offers better features and is very capable.
Chose Couchbase Server
MS Cosmos DB
AWS Storage
Google Storage
Chose Couchbase Server
[Couchbase] lite has been in use for a long time for a couple of applications.
Chose Couchbase Server
Couchbase could outperform it's competition considerably for database reads and writes. Full text searches were still faster in Elasticsearch but this is more of a feature than a base platform requirement for us.
Chose Couchbase Server
At the time, Couchbase seemed the most mature of the NoSQL products and would allow us to achieve the goal of improving data access times for our products and services, giving the most benefit to our customers. MySQL was starting to be the bottleneck in our system performance …
Chose Couchbase Server
Performance-wise Couchbase is much better than MongoDB.
Chose Couchbase Server
Couchbase being a NoSQL database does not require a fixed schema and allows more flexibility in the development phase.
Chose Couchbase Server
Easy to deploy and manage. Clustering and replication is fairly simple and straightforward. According to developers, Couchbase scored higher points compared to the other products that we evaluated.
Chose Couchbase Server
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 …
Chose Couchbase Server
Single console for managing multi-cluster and multi-cloud deployment options and [the] ability to secure and isolate database information in a secure environment to prevent undefined access is great. Analyzing and delivering information and fast access and processing data …
Chose Couchbase Server
Experience with DataStax Cassandra was seamless, but the cost and effort to support it was not justified. Also commercial process experience with Couchbase was much better. ActiveSpaces is a good technology for big TIBCO shop, but keeping with the lifecycle of it is not easy. I …
Chose Couchbase Server
A strategic company, upcoming products, enhanced concepts. Couchbase is a single platform offering many different smaller products together viz Full-Text Search, Analytics, Eventing, Indexing, Querying, Integration with other products.
I also look forward to knowing more about …
Chose Couchbase Server
None of the products mentioned above provided a seamless synchronization strategy that could be available on-premises at the time.
Chose Couchbase Server
I'm not qualified enough to make a meaningful comparison, but 2 years after, I hear regularly about issues on Mongo from the other teams, especially on the SRE side. On our side, not much to say, except that it works. Ram, CPU, disk behave like expected. Same for bandwidth. …
Features
Apache CouchDBCouchbase Server
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache CouchDB
7.9
Ratings
11% below category average
Couchbase Server
8.9
Ratings
1% above category average
Performance8.00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Availability8.50 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Concurrency8.50 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security6.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Scalability8.00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Data model flexibility7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache CouchDBCouchbase Server
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache CouchDBCouchbase Server
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
2.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache CouchDBCouchbase Server
Likelihood to Recommend
It's good as a general JSON document store and basic map/reduce system. For more specialized tasks like message queuing, graph traversal, streaming metrics aggregation, or arbitrary table joins, I'd recommend another database.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
  • Ease of install and setup.
  • Ease of syncing with another database. This was truly set it and forget it.
  • The REST API to read data. No additional drivers are needed to work with CouchDB.
Read full review
  • Easy to store unstructured data and has great performance
  • Managing security is super easy which can be managed across different levels
  • UI is pretty simple to use and manage the cluster
  • Backup of the data is very easy and the restoration/recovery is fairly easy as well with the in-built tools.
  • Easy integration with elasticsearch for replication
  • It is fairly easy to scale up or scale down the cluster
Read full review
Cons
  • SUPER SLOW. We do tons of data and S3 and just using the file system were both way faster
  • Using views is too complex
  • Stores entire DB as 1 file, good luck when it becomes many TB
Read full review
  • Cluster sizing during the design phase can be improved, especially if the client lacks prior experience. Vendor consultants are very meticulous in order to provide best of class performance and response time, although some more real-world pragmatic approach is often needed.
  • Couchbase Lite 2 went thru a major revamp, which broke the compatibility of the applications with some features removed and other changed. That needed development teams working to refactor the applications.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
As a highly distributed database system, CouchDB naturally has strong high availability with traffic load-balancing capability. It is also easy to scale and replicate data in a cluster for redundancy. However, there is still some room for query performance improvement in the future.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Usability
Couchdb is very simple to use and the features are also reduced but well implemented. In order to use it the way its designed, the ui is adequate and easy. Of course, there are some other task that can't be performed through the admin ui but the minimalistic design allows you to use external libraries to develop custom scripts
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Performance
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
it support is minimal also hw requirements. Also for development, we can have databases replicated everywhere and the replication is automagical. once you set up the security and the rules for replication, you are ready to go. The absence of a model let you build your app the way you want it
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Open Source, and freely able to install it on any OS you desire (the big 3, anyways) CouchDB was selected for that, it's early-adoption of JSON and its mobile-friendly environment. Also, I have used it off and on in various non-professional projects, and it was really one of the first exposure to databases in my career
Read full review
Couchbase could outperform it's competition considerably for database reads and writes. Full text searches were still faster in Elasticsearch but this is more of a feature than a base platform requirement for us.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Biggest impact on our business has been that CouchDB has been pretty invisible from a cost or issues perspective. It just works.
  • We use the Apache releases, so it's free. Of course there is a cost to "free" - we have invested time to become fluent in using and understanding CouchDB. But we feel the investment was well worth the effort and we have a solid, fundamental technology to our products that "just works".
  • There are some things we do - SaaS vs self-hosting - that have probably been kept simple by using CouchDB. Overall, we are extremely happy with CouchDB.
Read full review
  • There have been several areas of our application [that] really needed an ACID compliant database (e.g. strong transactional guarantees) that we thought we could work around while using Couchbase. [In my opinion] that turned out to be a poor bet. You need to be certain that the specific characteristics of a NoSQL database fit your problem.
  • Couchbase does eliminate the need for schema upgrades completely. I.e no downtime or conversion windows as you migrate your data model, adding attributes, etc. This helped with the deployment timeframe associated with DB changes.
  • The database is (apparently) a bit more of a space/memory consumer than originally anticipated. During deployments, we received constant pressure from Couchbase consulting teams to eliminate/reduce the number of indexes, and this was because any mutations to docs in a bucket must check for impact against all indexes. More recent years have started to address this with their "collections" features, which helps isolate indexes to specific sub-groupings of documents.
Read full review
ScreenShots