IBM Cloudant Reviews & Insights

Score7.4 out of 10

123 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM Cloudant are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Efficient Data Retrieval: Users have highlighted the ease of retrieving data for analysis as a key benefit, with many stating its importance. Reliable and Speedy Updates: Customers value staying updated with market changes due to the tool's reliability and speed, as mentioned by multiple reviewers. Excellent Customer Service: The efficient response time for bi-directional syncs and valuable statistics provided by Cloudant are appreciated by users in terms of decision-making. Smooth Integration Process: Users find the integration with Cloud Functions and a GUI designed for non-engineers positively mentioned, indicating its user-friendly approach. Advanced Data Storage Capabilities: Users praise the tool's indexing and data storage capabilities, emphasizing their satisfaction with this aspect of the service.

IBM Cloudant Reviews

16 Reviews

Engineering

Outstanding Services and products!!!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 28, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Software development and cloud storage from IBM

Pros

Stay up to date with the ever changing market
Fast and reliable
Easy to use
Great customer service

Cons

I think for now it works great I think it can scale further than it already has with the outstanding company IBM is and how much it means to the world as other things with time it should grow!

Likelihood to Recommend

It’s really great for mobile developers and the development they do and also web based development as well! It makes it easier to get the job done and that’s convenient for time but not only that it’s great for the continued growth all around as businesses strive to be better for the consumer each and every day!

Alternatives

Great product need more experience with it but love it so far!

Orion Salazar

Student in Engineering at Coursera (Information Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

1 year of experience

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Happily moved back to cloudant after hosting my own couchdb for a few years.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 14, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I recommend everyone who evaluated ibm cloudant in the past years since the cloudant aquisition and decided against it due to reliability and maturity of ibm cloud to revisit cloudant. For the last 2 years I can say nothing but positives about the experience and i moved all in-house couchDB and document database hosting to ibm without any issues at all. As a sidenote i was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the fulltext and faceting features of cloudant and even have some workloads handled by cloudant that i previously fullfilled with a separate elastic search installation. This was planned as an intermediate solution but cloudant search worked so well, that it is now a standard part of our solution stack.

Pros

sync data with multi master setups and offline capable clients
schema-less document storage
subscription and reactivity to changing data

Cons

ibm cloud billing is still a bit strict and inflexible for some markets and credit card providers, i needed to verify my company and the process could have been nicer.

Likelihood to Recommend

perfect for schema-less document needs especially if accessing via http anyways, irreplaceable as soon as multi master or local first (eg. latency critical) clients come into the mix!

high performance/ latency critical joins that cannot be implemented with denormalized data are better done in other systems.

cloudant search does not provide all features of elastic search and can get a bit pricey for many concurrent global quieries that dont work partitioned.

Jan Johannes

CTO in Engineering at Freelance (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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My words on IBM cloudant

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 9, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used the ibm cloudant database to store the data, actually i want to store the data in nosql and cloudant is a no sql database, So its resoved my data storage issue. We can create n number of collection in a single data base and can access seperately to fulfill the purpose.

Pros

Filter by indexing
Data storage
Nosql

Cons

In schema prepration
Indexing to filter
Tabular view of stored data

Likelihood to Recommend

It's very easy to implement the IBM cloud and database in the rest API we can also view the data in the form of table. We can also create the query on the IBM cloudant panel to use in our program that provide a very easy way to developer software in iffective time frame.

Alternatives

MongoDB, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and MySQL

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 querying time is very low as compare to others.

Pankaj Choudhary

Sr. Android Developer in Engineering at Pataa® (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Cloudant – I Use It With My Erlang Stack

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 17, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Cloudant like I use Couchdb. Each user has a database and I like the ease of use with authentication as well as falling back on Couchdb defaults if wanting to do so. I deal with real-time wait data and use pouchdb to handle my front end.

Pros

Ease of use coming from Couchdb - views, indexes, auth, revisions
Uptime has been excellent
Replication with ease

Cons

Better branding - People not used to using IBM services don’t know that Cloudant [was] built around Couchdb.
Documentation can be done a bit more organized (some are very old) and do share more of [the] fallback features that Couchdb supplies and what is offered too. I have to sometimes look deep to find out things like fallback auth to use Couchdb auth users for example. Simple stuff.
I honestly over time have really no other issues and they aren’t anything extensive since I know Couchdb well.
I [have] been happy so far.

Likelihood to Recommend

I work in Erlang stack so Couchdb and Rabbitmq are my go-to tech stack. In this area, I highly recommend [it], it is easy.

Alternatives

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.

Michael Adler

Full stack dev (Erlang) in Engineering at Freelance (Entertainment, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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A simple database with fully-featured GUI, "just works" scaling and replication, and straightforward pricing

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 21, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used the IBM Cloudant in two scenarios: One, for a simple place to persist text to be displayed in a chatbot that played nicely with the rest of our IBM Cloud stack, particularly with IBM Cloud Functions; and the other, a database with a simple enough query language for non-engineers to learn — which should also work nicely with IBM Cloud Functions and have a built-in, easy to use GUI

Pros

Integration with Cloud Functions
Included GUI for non-engineers
Fixed, throughput/expected use-based pricing

Cons

Better documentation
Expensive pricing for very small projects
Better tabular views

Likelihood to Recommend

Our organization found Cloudant most suitable if One, a fixed pricing structure would make the most sense, for example in a situation where the project Cloudant is being used in makes its revenue in procurement or fixed retainer — thus the predictability of costs is paramount; Two, where you need to frequently edit the data and/or share access to the query engine to non-engineers — this is where the GUI shines.

Alternatives

Azure Cosmos DB and MongoDB Atlas

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.

Verified User

General Manager in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Cloudant Rocks!

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

February 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a cloud based solution provider and our products are deployed on the IBM cloud and we used IBM Cloudant as a database (persistent) storage. We use it across the board to store anything that needs persistent storage, from text to images and document attachments as well.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for unstructured data and where data elements are self-contained for the most part. For relational-type data, Cloudant presents some challenges.

Alternatives

DB2 and MongoDB

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.

Deepak Kaul

CTO in Engineering at CogAbility (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Feels like floating on a Cloud

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cloudant DB is utilized in our organization in cooperation with IBM IOT platform to monitor supply chain for our disaster relief solution. Cloudant is also used to collect user reports and is used as a data dump for Watson learning to use for improving and also used for analytics.

Pros

It’s fast to setup and go
Good support for NodeJS
Integrates super easy with microservices

Cons

Documentation
Support for SQL

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM is suited for development POCs as it's extremely easy to get it up and running. Less suited to handle sequential data such as login info and such

Alternatives

Microsoft SQL Server

Infinitely better in every part. Except handling SQL

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Civic & Social Organization company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Cloudant is a great choice for DBaaS for mobile apps on multiple platforms and devices...

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 9, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudant as our online cloud database solution for our mobile health app. Our solution had to work cross platform with Android and iOS and allow syncing to local databases for offline use. Cloudant allowed for easy integration into our stack with very little setup. By not having to worry about converting between database architectures we were able to focus our development time on building features into our app.

Pros

Easy Setup
Simple API's
Great Documentation
Open Standards / Works with CouchDB and mobile PouchDB

Cons

Built in live listeners to watch for data changes would be a nice addition

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are using MEAN stack and require a 3rd party cloud database it really is up there with firebase. Firebase has a couple extra features attached to its non-sql DB, and if you need those particular features then that might be a best choice. But if you don't, cloudant is far more open and most scripts and tools that work with CloudDB will work with cloudant. Firebase is far more proprietary which gives it a steeper learning curve also. Another thing to consider is how many different types of software will interact with your DB. If you are just building a web app and only one application needs the data then arguably the pros and cons against any hosted solution like Amazon Dynamo, Modulus (MongoDB), or Firebase is going to be minimal and subjective. But if you are using lots of different technologies and many different devices there is a major advantage to going with a less proprietary solution. You get all the compatibility of CouchDB but the reliability of having IBM behind your DBaaS.

Alternatives

Firebase and Amazon DynamoDB

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 experience with in the past....

Wes Wilson

CTO (Chief Technical Officer) in Engineering at YukonBaby (Hospital & Health Care, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Short and sweet

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 22, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's our primary store for user-generated and transactional data.

Pros

Scalability.
Fast ingest rates.
Fault tolerance.
Great for building data pipelines (_changes streams).

Cons

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

Great when the primary objective is reliable and quick data storage. Not ideal for applications that require running complex, relational queries.

Alternatives Evaluated

Elasticsearch and CouchDB

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.

Kris Bandurski

Executive Vice President, Engineering in Engineering at Green Man Gaming (Retail, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Cloudant - help you manage your cloud

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 19, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were developing an IOT solution to reduce the power consumption in housing communities, for which IBM Bluemix was helping us a lot to achieve it. I was the major developer and architect for the team. Since the project was confined within our department we were using it only within our department.

Our main business objective was to perform data analysis on the data obtained - we had to store the IoT related information in the database and do fast processing on the data so we had to go with NoSQL database and indeed Cloudant was readily available - already integrated with Bluemix and much easier option was it stores the data as JSON which was much more convenient to our use case.

Pros

Easy integration
Better performance
High availability

Cons

Very limited functionality
Not much cloudant database management tools available

Likelihood to Recommend

The cloudant sync option was very helpful during migration process for smaller data, but if you have large amounts of data, then import options are not that great or the documentation for importing was not that helpful.

Alternatives Evaluated

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.

Verified User

Employee in Engineering (Higher Education company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience