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
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.
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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.
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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.
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  • 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
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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
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  • 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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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  • 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.
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