DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. PouchDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.71
Rank	#227	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.couchbase.com

cratedb.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.couchbase.com

cratedb.com/docs

firebase.google.com/docs/database

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

Crate

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2011

2013

2012

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

JavaScript

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions (Javascript)

limited functionality with using 'rules'

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

rights management via user accounts

yes, based on authentication and database rules

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
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Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
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Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

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