IBM Cloudant vs. RavenDB

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 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
RavenDB
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
RavenDB is a NoSQL Document Database that is fully transactional (ACID) across the database and throughout clusters. The database minimizes the need for third party addons, tools, or support to boost developer productivity and get projects into production fast. Users can setup and secure a data cluster deploy in the cloud, on-premise or in a hybrid environment. RavenDB offers a Database as a Service solution, allowing users to pass on all…N/A
Pricing
IBM CloudantRavenDB
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 CloudantRavenDB
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM CloudantRavenDB
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloudant
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM cloudant documentation is very easy to understand and because of that the implementation is also very easy. We found some difficulties in case of aws documents implementation. Performance of the cloudant database is also high as compare to the other databases. Indexing and …
Chose IBM Cloudant
I like [the] ease of use of Cloudant. Redis and Fauna have time to live features so for caching and temp data that is what I use along with messaging queues.
Chose IBM Cloudant
MongoDB Atlas and Azure Cosmos DB are the closest competitors we found with Cloudant, especially in terms of fixed pricing and having a GUI for easy viewing and quick edits of data. Cloudant's pricing model flat out beats MongoDB Atlas' in terms of how easy it would be to …
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant is great for quick deployment and configs of a database service, especially when it comes to rapid prototyping. In a research capacity, we need to spin up web services and run experiments quickly. IBM Cloudant is a fuss-free database service [that] aids in this …
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant wins in all aspects, from cost, ease of deployment, features, global availability and much more.
Chose IBM Cloudant
The gap that we wanted to cover was to deploy a self-managed CouchDB environment, which would allow us the bidirectional replication of Databases through several physical locations of the same client. IBM Cloudant was the best choice after evaluating some other platforms with …
Chose IBM Cloudant
MS SQl is more specific to relational data. Overall, it is more mature with a more feature-filled interface, user access management, and tools to manage data.
Chose IBM Cloudant
None, since we are a dedicated IBM Gold Business Partner as well as a respected IBM development and design partner, we stick with IBM products.
Chose IBM Cloudant
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, …
Chose IBM Cloudant
In our case, it was a no-brainer since we were using IBM Cloud. In comparison to DB2 the ease of use and JSON support was the key.
Chose IBM Cloudant
As its documentation and help are always available, it's easier to manage than any other database mentioned.
Chose IBM Cloudant
As I mentioned Redis was the first option for this implementation, IBM Cloudant excels the data center sync.
Chose IBM Cloudant
I have mainly used Cloudant as I work with IBM Cloud in my role and therefore it was easiest (and cheapest) to set up for the small scale prototypes we are building. (Which do however sometimes lead to scaled implementation)
Chose IBM Cloudant
In our case it was a no-brainer since we were using IBM Cloud. In comparison to DB2 the ease of use and JSON support was the key.
Chose IBM Cloudant
Infinitely better in every part. Except handling SQL
Chose IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant DB is backed by CouchDB and that too hosted on IBM Cloud is the key. Concurrency and durability is the key here. In-memory capabilities are non-existent on the IBM Cloudant DB.
Chose IBM Cloudant
We chose Cloudant because it was fully managed and used in the marketplace, unlike MongoDB was at the time, and it supported JSON which SQL Server 2016 didn't.
Chose IBM Cloudant
It's easier to use than Dynamo, more open than Firebase, and has better documentation that CouchDB... it might not be fair to compare Modulus, Modulus obviously suffers from some scalability issues and might not be in the same class... but its a hosted DB service we had some …
Chose IBM Cloudant
All other NoSQL document-centric DB must be installed on premise on in the cloud as complicated clusters. The "as a service" formula and the open source origin were the same reasons for Cloudant choice, freeing us of all system and administration tasks!
Chose IBM Cloudant
Cloudant is a database as a service with a strong support team. The feature set is comparable to other solutions but not all are managed services, or have easy scalability, or can demonstrate production level reliability and performance.
Chose IBM Cloudant
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. …
Chose IBM Cloudant
Cloudant blows all of the other competitors out of the water. The robust UI, the scalability, the management console, these are all reasons why Cloudant is a superior product to any of these "competitors". Cloudant is head and shoulders above the rest. It was a pleasure to …
Chose IBM Cloudant
I've even worked with Cassandra, but I found Cloudant to be much simpler, easier, neat and efficient. Cassandra was not highly scalable but Cloudant was much efficient in it. Even the Monitoring and other scripts were pre-built which made it much time efficient for us.
Chose IBM Cloudant
I chose Cloudant because they had the best low end traffic prices while still providing room for pay as you need it scalability. I had an Amazon EC2 instance for a few years and I had to pay so much for it even though it hardly had any traffic. Being connected to IBM helped me …
RavenDB
Chose RavenDB
First of all, Microsoft Access is also a powerful, efficient, and free database. But the feel of it, I mean the GUI is not all great for me. It is very eye-stressing. MongoDB is also a good database, it too is efficient, productive, and powerful. But, upon this, RavenDB is a …
Chose RavenDB
The team is very nice, very helpful, and answer very fast to any answer you may have. Thanks to their help, we were able to use and understand all the RavenDB features in no time! Documentation for server and client is very clear, with a lot of use cases. Maintenance is easy, …
Chose RavenDB
RavenDB is just smarter than the competitors. The mapping reduction sorting is head and shoulders above everything else I've used. Nothing really approaches comparable in terms of complexity. Because of the searching of predetermined categories, read efficiency is terrible. …
Chose RavenDB
The company needed a cache server that was closest and the most accessible, which is why we are currently experimenting with RavenDB which gives us the option to set up our hub in a local setting.
Chose RavenDB
Much better support, more transparent pricing, much more easy setup process, native integration into c# / net core. We also tried to set up a Mongo Atlas cluster by self-study but weren't able to get this running. There is a much better response when searching in google, but a …
Chose RavenDB
While MongoDB is in general more popular, I cannot fathom why that is. If you want ACID support (and as a developer, you'll always want that), MongoDB is way slower when compared to RavenDB. Furthermore, RavenStudio is just integrated, while

Chose RavenDB
Flexibility and performance really set RavenDB apart.
Chose RavenDB
[RavenDB is] just simply much cleverer than the competition. The map reduce indexing is a league above anything else I have used. Nothing else comes close on abstraction as well. Read performance is terrifying due to querying pre calculated indexes. It is just a pity it is not …
Chose RavenDB
Having ACID compliance is a big enough reason to choose RavenDB over the other products. You don't have to worry about losing your data if the plug is pulled. You're able to perform many actions within a transaction and not worry about your data being in a bad state if the …
Chose RavenDB
Installing and configuring. We had some big issues with indexing the data after the documents were created and wanted to expand the index, with millions of records this task mostly did not complete despite a dedicated server.
Chose RavenDB
Out of the many variants of document and SQL databases out there that we have used, RavenDB is our no 1 choice for anything but the smallest projects which can be served with a very small SQL instance. Other than that, RavenDB packs more features and is easier to work with than …
Chose RavenDB
The given alternatives are also powerful and really good noSQL databases but the highest availability of RavenDB allows me/us to know it a lot better.
RavenDB is encrypted by default wherever we use it in production and it has a high level of documents compression.
Chose RavenDB
As I have said before in the previous questions ... RavenDB has a very simple clean UI, but stacks up in its power. Though new to me, I have found it to be much easier to learn and use than my previous database - Microsoft SQL Server. RavenDB's simple design and meaningful …
Chose RavenDB
MongoDB, Alma | Rethink SIS. and Azure Cosmos DB
Chose RavenDB
Being that ACID and cluster transaction support is a big plus against all of them. Cool prices on Azure and AWS is another plus. The ability to search between millions of documents.
Chose RavenDB
When I first started using RavenDB, I did evaluate Mongo DB but found it to be lacking. The primary issue was that Mongo DB did not support atomic consistency for the persistence of multiple documents at the same time, although I think this may not be an issue with subsequent …
Chose RavenDB
We have evaluated or used three other databases in the process of building our product.

Amazon Aurora (MySQL)
Chose RavenDB
Once I had got my head around the concept of a document database it was a happy bye-bye to SQL Server.
Firebird - far too fiddly - I found myself writing a silly API to sit on top of Firebird just to do the most basic things.
MongoDb - in the very short time I spent with it, it …
Chose RavenDB
RavenDB has a richer API, has security out of the box (via certificates), produces indexes automatically and updates them when data changes.
Chose RavenDB
We chose Raven over Mongo because it has robust support for multi-document transactions, first-class .NET and LINQ support, a well-designed API that has inspired imitation and has better tooling out of the box. We chose Raven over Redis because Raven is a full persistent …
Features
IBM CloudantRavenDB
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloudant
9.1
Ratings
3% above category average
RavenDB
9.1
Ratings
3% above category average
Performance9.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Availability8.30 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Concurrency9.80 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Security8.20 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Scalability9.00 Ratings9.60 Ratings
Data model flexibility9.80 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility9.00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM CloudantRavenDB
Small Businesses
Redis Software
Redis Software
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Redis Software
Redis Software
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Redis Software
Redis Software
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM CloudantRavenDB
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.3
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.5
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM CloudantRavenDB
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM Cloudant is the best implementation of CouchDB, or any NoSQL database that you could use if you are looking for a database that can handle extremely rapid writes to a database without having to worry about transactional integrity. IBM Cloudant also abstracts out CouchDB's replication/multi-node requirements and ensures high availability on its own. It also allows map-reduce based indexing which will allow massive databases to be aggregated and queried very quickly. It should not be used in cases where you require structured data which is organized according to a schema, or if you want to maintain ACID database properties.
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RavenDB is very well suited for NoSQL beginners to start easily setting up and using a NoSQL database. Also to set up a high performance and high availability cluster is possible without reading tons of documentation. Very straightforward assistant! The performance is really high.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Document Database - no Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch
  • ACID support that is optimized for performance
  • Can be easily integrated into automated tests (unit tests)
  • Easily configurable via C# code
  • Comes directly with RavenStudio - no SSMS or SQL Developer required
  • In general low footprint when it comes to memory and disk consumption
  • Useful safety nets for new developers - e.g. by default an exception is thrown when you make too many requests within a session
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • Developing methods is challenging if developers are unfamiliar with the accurate simulation approach.
  • It does not allow you to replicating, or authorized access without first acquiring a license.
  • The lack of evidence of tracking records in the enterprise systems raises several concerns about RavenDB.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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We've had an excellent experience using RavenDB. Internally we are testing the newer features in 5.0 such as time series, which will effect the con specified previously dependent on the real world performance. We foresee that BattleCrate will continue to use RavenDB as we grow.
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Usability
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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Really good .NET client that is very easy to use. The management studio is excellent and puts anything that Microsoft or Oracle have to shame. Very quick to develop with once the complexity hurdle has been overcome. Initially using it can be a bit painful until you fully grasp the event sourced nature of the indexing.
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Reliability and Availability
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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No answers on this topic
Performance
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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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Had a question that was answered in minutes. Never used a NoSQL approach before, but was able to be proficient in a matter of hours. Easy to read API Documentation. 5 out 5 support in book, I have never once ran into an issue that wasn't quickly solved by either their support team or myself doing a quick search online.
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Online Training
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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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
  • 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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RavenFS changed along the way and made us change the codes.
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Alternatives Considered
MongoDB Atlas and Azure Cosmos DB are the closest competitors we found with Cloudant, especially in terms of fixed pricing and having a GUI for easy viewing and quick edits of data. Cloudant's pricing model flat out beats MongoDB Atlas' in terms of how easy it would be to predict costs. Cosmos DB is a much closer competitor, as it integrates well with Azure's stack similarly to Cloudant and the rest of the IBM Cloud stack; similar [throughout]-based pricing and replication options; and even the GUI and ease of query using SQL, which my team and I were more familiar with. Where Cloudant beats out Cosmos DB is again having a more simple pricing model (ops/sec vs Cosmos' "request units" voodoo) and being based on open-source software assuaging fears of vendor lock-in.
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RavenDB is just smarter than the competitors. The mapping reduction sorting is head and shoulders above everything else I've used. Nothing really approaches comparable in terms of complexity. Because of the searching of predetermined categories, read efficiency is terrible. RavenDB is a storage system designed for the current websites and functional prototypes. It has an easy-to-use interface and enables quick replication and backup installation. Furthermore, technical assistance responds quickly and walks you through the implementation and deployment procedures.
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Scalability
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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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Saving in-terms of cost of procuring and maintaining hardware, which will be realized over the next 5 years.
  • Positive ROI in terms of the number of FTEs involved in maintaining our databases; our DBAs can now focus on other important and business critical applications.
  • Best ROI in terms of our organization's vision - they are no longer anxious / nervous to move to the cloud. We are already on the CLOUD.
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  • RavenDB has saved my customers a lot of money with their cloud services' tiered model. The database is able to grow with the project/company and can start out small at a low cost.
  • RavenDB is free for three nodes and three CPUs, which makes it great for development scenarios. You're able to start rapidly building applications without having to worry about licensing.
  • Scaling out has allowed us to use three small cloud servers when starting out and get the performance and throughput of a single larger server.
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