DBMS > Couchbase vs. CouchDB vs. PouchDB vs. RavenDB vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. CouchDB vs. PouchDB vs. RavenDB vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Document store

Graph DBMS

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

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

pouchdb.com/guides

ravendb.net/docs

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Apache Software Foundation

Hibernating Rhinos

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2011

2005

2012

2010

2018

Current release

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

3.3.3, December 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

5.4, July 2022

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

GPL V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

JavaScript

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (RQL)

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

JavaScript

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

View functions in JavaScript

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

Multi-source replication

Journaling Streams

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

in-memory journaling

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

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Authorization levels configured per client per database

Role-based access control

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