Apache HBase vs. Couchbase Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HBase
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.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 HBaseCouchbase Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HBaseCouchbase 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 HBaseCouchbase Server
Features
Apache HBaseCouchbase Server
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache HBase
7.7
Ratings
14% below category average
Couchbase Server
8.9
Ratings
1% above category average
Performance7.10 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Availability7.80 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Concurrency7.00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security7.80 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Scalability8.60 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Data model flexibility7.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility8.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache HBaseCouchbase 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 HBaseCouchbase Server
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(0 ratings)
2.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(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)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache HBaseCouchbase Server
Likelihood to Recommend
HBase is well suited for streaming ingest, fast lookups, massive datasets, data warehouse lookup tables, RDBMS replacement, MongoDB replacement, key-value store, data scans, logs, JSON storage and some binary storage. My preferred use case is for storing data points like time series or data produced by sensors. I often use HBase when I need data available immediately and I am not looking for transactions. This is a great store for really wide tables with tons of columns. It is also great if you are not sure what type of data you are going to have. It really excels at sparse data.
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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
  • Scalable and truly non-relational data
  • HBase operations run in real-time on its database rather than MapReduce jobs
  • Scales linearly to support billions of rows with millions of columns
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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
  • Write performance
  • Performance support for parquet file format. supports, but performance wise still not there
  • API / library availability for spark, rather than creating a new library for it
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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
There's really not anything else out there that I've seen comparable for my use cases. HBase has never proven me wrong. Some companies align their whole business on HBase and are moving all of their infrastructure from other database engines to HBase. It's also open source and has a very collaborative community.
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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
No answers on this topic
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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Alternatives Considered
Compared NoSQL databases with traditional databases for faster retrieval and consistency. As MongoDB is a NoSQL supports dynamic fields, however, query performance is bad for aggregations and added maintenance. When compared with MySQL and Teradata, it could not scale up as fast as Hbase and added cost involved to it. HBase can be easily scalable to a huge volume of records, have a faster lookup and provides consistency
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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
  • Positive: Open source, easy to use, good to store big data.
  • Negative: SQL functionalities are not available.
  • More memory utilization
  • More troubleshooting
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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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ScreenShots