IBM Cloudant vs. MarkLogic Server

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
MarkLogic Server
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
MarkLogic Server is a multi-model database that has both NoSQL and trusted enterprise data management capabilities. The vendor states it is the most secure multi-model database, and it’s deployable in any environment. They state it is an ideal database to power a data hub.
$0.01
per MCU/per hour + 0.10 per GB/per month
Pricing
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
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
Low Priority Fixed
$0.01
per MCU/per hour + 0.10 per GB/per month
Standard Reserved
$0.07
per MCU/per hour + 0.10 per GB/per month
Standard On-Demand
$0.13
per MCU/per hour + 0.10 per GB/per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
Features
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloudant
9.1
Ratings
3% above category average
MarkLogic Server
7.9
Ratings
11% below category average
Performance9.70 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Availability8.30 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Concurrency9.80 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Security8.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Scalability9.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Data model flexibility9.80 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility9.00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
Small Businesses
Redis Software
Redis Software
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Redis Software
Redis Software
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Redis Software
Redis Software
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.3
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM CloudantMarkLogic Server
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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In an area where it will be built once and maintained, it shines. If you aim to use CI, temporary environments, or anything else, it is not very effective. Licensing is almost impossible on boxes that are to be created on the fly.
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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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  • Indexing is a major strength of MarkLogic. The out-of-the-box configuration is set up to handle a combination of text and fielded data. The indexing is also highly configurable. Those configuration options are at the heart of a lot of our high-volume, high-performance applications.
  • The industrial strength transactions and security are also a strength, particularly when we are dealing with user-created intellectual property.
  • The engineering support is a strength. They are big enough to have a really strong support and engineering staff, but small enough so that a medium-sized customer has access to it. They are very responsive to questions and problem reports.
  • The ability to move easily among XML and JSON is a strength.
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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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  • How to do complete data profiling on documents loaded in Marklogic database?
  • Customers need a tools which can be customized to suit their data profiling needs but currently the tools which MarkLogic provides fall short on this requirement.
  • Unit testing framework which is using only XQuery as the language is lacking some features.
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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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Our firm has consultants for a number of technologies/disciplines. While I am capable and experienced in other areas, my preference is always to work on engagements with MarkLogic. As an architect and developer, I get far more flexibility and performance from one product instead of cobbling together a stack of several products to provide a capability that MarkLogic has rolled into one great product.
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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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Very little about it can be done better or with greater ease. Even things that seem difficult aren't really that bad. There's multiple ways to accomplish any admin task. MarkLogic requires a fraction of administrative effort that you see with enterprise RDBMS like Oracle. MarkLogic is continually improving the tools to simplify cluster configuration and maintenance.
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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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There's always room for improvement. Some problems get solved faster than others, of course. MarkLogic's direct support is very responsive and professional. If they can't help immediately, they always have good feedback and are eager to receive information and details to work to replicate the problem. They are quick to escalate major support issues and production show-stopping problems. In addition to MarkLogic's direct support, there are several employees who are very active among the community and many questions and common issues get quick attention from helpful responses to email and StackOverflow questions.
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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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No answers on this topic
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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In comparison to both Mongo and HBase, MarkLogic wins in terms of integration to other systems, while loosing in terms of pricing. In terms of documentation all will be in same range putting MarkLogic a bit forward.
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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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  • It took longer than expected to develop our application and get the level of consistent performance necessary. As a result, profit was flat for a couple of years but the benefits are really starting to kick in.
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