Couchbase is a great NoSQL database and most businesses will benefit from this software. For those launching and developing applications, Couchbase is a solution. In addition, those businesses that requires a NoSQL data base will as well benefit. In a nutshell, Couchbase has something for every business depending on the version you choose.
Its very well suited for storing graph types relationship information, such as a group of people and their relationships. Data modeling this sort of information in a traditional SQL database is a pain and inefficient. Using Neo4J allows for efficient modeling of data while providing rich querying capabilities using Cypher. Its also a great fit for any programming language because of its support for REST API. It's less appropriate for any other data structure other than Graph data. So as with any DB, evaluate the data structure and query and if the querying revolves around relationships, then Neo4J is a fit. If there is more need for looking up individual nodes and their associated information, Neo4J might not be the most efficient solution in the market.
It would be nice to have some concept of namespaces, or some way of roughly making a single instance multi-tenant. It'd be nice to make sandboxing easier.
I have not used anything like Neo4J because of how unique it is in the work that it allows me to do. I am not aware of any other graph database platforms and it might be because it is a growing area (especially in the world of pharmaceuticals). I would be open to trying other softwares though.
For experimentation purposes, it had a positive impact on my company. It was very natural to work with Neo4j and so intuitive to visualize the data.
Neo4j community edition is free, which is what we experimented on. So there was no investment up front apart from employee's time. But this quickly gave results and it was time well spent.
Neo4j is a cool but very new technology. It was hard to have people onboard, especially some of the leadership and relational folks.
