IBM Cloudant Information 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.

Reviews

19 Reviews

Information

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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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.

Verified User

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

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

IBM Cloudant is the best hosted CouchDB out there

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 18, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses IBM Cloudant as a distributed NoSQL database solution for implementation on client applications in the Internet of Things space. IBM Cloudant allows rapid writes of unstructured JSON data received from IoT devices on a second-by-second basis. It also allows effective use of map-reduce to aggregate results out of collections defined by within IBM Cloudant databases, allowing for millions of records to be aggregated and used effectively for analytics and reporting.

Pros

Rapid writes
Map reduce
High storage capacity
High availability

Cons

Time to index large databases needs to be improved
Could use more structure in terms of separating entities within a database
Better pricing on storage sizes as database size increases exponentially

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.

Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology in Information Technology at Virtusa (Computer Software, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Great advantages and simplicity of deployment. It is as I would summarize the Cloudant service from IBM.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 30, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cloudant is used to have a central repository of clients' databases to which information generated in different branches that have local Couchdb deployments arrivals. In this way, we manage to have the data synchronized in all of them through continuous replication.

Pros

The response time for bi-directional syncs with the Couchdb engine is excellent.
The statistics provided by Cloudant allow us to make decisions about the implementation of new features or improvements over existing ones in future versions of our software, allowing us to continuously optimize processes.

Cons

Improvement in the documentation of some client libraries, such as the Cloudant library for Java.

Likelihood to Recommend

The deployment for bidirectional replications in the database through Cloudant is the scenario that we have used the most and with which we are very satisfied.

Jerry Ebherson Sanchez Aguado

Gestión de proyectos in Information Technology at INS INGENIERIA (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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I am very happy with IBM Cloudant

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 10, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Cloudant primarily in our Watson IoT Platform, in combination with IBM Cloud Pak and Node-Red to receive and store IoT sensor data. It is used across a significant part of our organization, since we are an IBM Business partner for the entire IBM Maximo software stack. Everywhere IOT or Predictive Maintenance Insights is involved we make use of WIOTP in combination with IBM Cloudand.

Pros

Watson IoT Platform--ease of use
IBM Cloud Pak and Cloud Foundry apps--fast service connection
Fast recovery
Easy to merge databases

Cons

API connectivity especially in combination with Node-Red causes too many connectivity errors / token errors.
Sometimes it is difficult to store images (BLOB files). We always need to figure out how it was working. A better guidance/instruction on this would be appreciated

Likelihood to Recommend

When you need fast and easy use of Cloudant, we recommend to use IBM Cloudant as a simple GUI-based data storage tool. IBM Cloudant can do much more and has an impressive backbone. Of cause it isn't comparable with a database like DB2, but is enough for storage of, for instance, IOT data.

Jan-Willem Steur

Senior Product Design/Development Engineer in Research & Development at ZNAPZ BV (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Win-Win for IBM Cloud

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 14, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were using IBM Cloudant as our cloud storage platform for a project where we were collecting real-time environmental data. Later, we used this raw data for data manipulation and data visualization. The data was collected using a physical custom-made IOT sensor that was connected to IBM Cloud. The purpose of this product was to aid impact investors to make guided, data backed decisions.

Pros

Easy collaboration with IBM Cloud.
Data easily downloadable in required format.
Easy to use UI.

Cons

More flexibility in displaying data stored.
More ways of visualizing data.
Performing data manipulation options.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is greatly suited when working on IBM Cloud due to its easy connectivity and synchronization.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Cloudant Review

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

February 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using Cloudant as part of a CEAN stack for various different prototypes that we build for different clients, we mainly use Cloudant because it is hosted in the cloud and has a free tier for when we are only experimenting.

Pros

Adding and deleting documents in the UI is intuitive
The UI is helpful for managing the data
It is hosted on the cloud and doesn’t require much set up to get going

Cons

The @Cloudant/Cloudand npm SDK has very limited functionality when compared to mongodb, the Cloudant queries that can be made with JSON is good however, but it is not obvious from the start that you can do this.

Likelihood to Recommend

The key for us is to see examples of this database being used at scale to show that it is a proven technology and also examples of where a NoSQL DB is best used

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

IBM Cloudant DB - Scalability and Performance re-defined

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cloudant DB is currently being used at 2 of our customers' places. The implementation is more confined to a couple of departments / function areas of the organization, but surely they are looking to adopt it on a bigger scale. The DB hosts not only their custom-built vendor onboarding applications, but also supports a portion of their intranet portal to manage a lot of employee related non-HR information like events, knowledge bases, quizzes application etc. They are looking to migrate data and applications from other databases to IBM Cloudant DB.

Pros

For us, performance and scalability is the key, and Cloudant DB backed by CouchDB is scalable and performant.
IBM Cloudant dB is very easy to provision for sandbox, development, QA as well as production.
Support for Java for CouchDB app server analytics enables a greater control for over developers.
Schema free oriented very easy to program and build applications on it.
We love it!!

Cons

Lacks in-memory capabilities
Limited support for programming languages like Python, R, Perl
No XML support
No SQL support :(

Likelihood to Recommend

Applications where concurrency and durability are more important as compared to in-memory functionalities, IBM Cloudant DB is recommended. For us, the key question is to have Java and C# programming support on the database, for building applications, however if Python, Perl or R support is required, then IBM Cloudant DB may not be an intelligent choice.

Naresh Jasotani

Director - Data and Analytics Services (Presales) in Information Technology at Miracle Software Systems, Inc (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Flexible data transportation HUB without structure constraints

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 12, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cloudant NoSQL DB based on JSON is the foundation of our SaaS software solutions proposed in SaaS when the aim is document centric. Our last implementation was the Tracking & Tracing service offered in SaaS via IBM Bluemix, where all actors authorized can post their JSON docs in a very easy way without the constraint of one specific schema, and can retrieve or update the documents with RESTFul APIs that trace the "status" of each document.

Cloudant's flexibility helps in adding the data "views" even after the document creation, and this opens a new way to design documents, freeing them from relational constraints.

The replication function allows you to have in real time the same copy of docs updated in other Cloudant databases - even geographically distributed. Some interesting embedded features such as the Geo Query, based on the standard Geo-JSON specification, open the way to the development of location awareness solutions without the hassles to manage the geometry of the geo-map searching.

Pros

Managing different documents in JSON format: every well formed structure of JSON docs are stored without a previous data schema support.
Queu reviews: are the power map-reduce functions applying after the documents ingestion.
Replication: powerful and easy DevOps function to save, copy or back up the data from one Cloudant DB to another in synchronizing way even between different sites geographically distributed.
The automatic creation of Data Warehouse relational DB DashDB for Analytics from NoSQL is one of the [most] invaluable features ever found. The SDP-Schema Discovery Process is really unleashing the power of JSON schema-less into structured relational DB ready for all analytic tools without any programming intervention.
The API GEO call based on GeoJSON structure, is one of the features that has been much more awaited in the "location awareness" application now implicit in quite all applications from marketing to logistics. The GEO API is built by the query options making the geo search application integration more easy than ever.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloudant is perfect when you have to manage fixed documents, but with different content and an articulated data hierarchy. Furthermore it maintains many document structures in one instance of the DB. Cloudant should be used when the document has a "lazy" life cycle (better if it is only based on its workflow status information) and it is not comparable to an OLTP system where the data is constantly being updated.

Romualdo Gobbo

Owner in Corporate at NEWLOG Consulting Srl (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

2 years of experience

View profile

The best prices and easy from start to scale

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 13, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudant to store the data that can't be easily recreated.

Pros

I like that I can group multiple data objects into a single request to reduce the cost.

Likelihood to Recommend

I haven't tried it at scale, but it was extremely easy to get started and works very well for what I am using it for. The low end price point can't be beat. Really, it's physically impossible without them paying me to use the site... now there is an idea! Thanks Cloudant

Peter Ivie

Full Stack Developer in Engineering at GeneSys Foundation (Internet, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

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Flexible data transportation HUB without structure constraints

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 12, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Managing different documents in JSON format: every well formed structure of JSON docs are stored without a previous data schema support.
Queu reviews: are the power map-reduce functions applying after the documents ingestion.
Replication: powerful and easy DevOps function to save, copy or back up the data from one Cloudant DB to another in synchronizing way even between different sites geographically distributed.
The automatic creation of Data Warehouse relational DB DashDB for Analytics from NoSQL is one of the [most] invaluable features ever found. The SDP-Schema Discovery Process is really unleashing the power of JSON schema-less into structured relational DB ready for all analytic tools without any programming intervention.
The API GEO call based on GeoJSON structure, is one of the features that has been much more awaited in the "location awareness" application now implicit in quite all applications from marketing to logistics. The GEO API is built by the query options making the geo search application integration more easy than ever.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Romualdo Gobbo

Owner in Corporate at NEWLOG Consulting Srl (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

2 years of experience

View profile