DBMS > CouchDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MongoDB vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MongoDB vs. Transbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

One of the most popular document stores available both as a fully managed cloud service and for deployment on self-managed infrastructure

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Search engine

integrated Lucene index, currently in MongoDB Atlas only.
Time Series DBMS

Time Series Collections introduced in Release 5.0
Vector DBMS

currently available in the MongoDB Atlas cloud service only

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	421.65
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.mongodb.com

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Elastic

Google

MongoDB, Inc

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2005

2010

2017

2009

1987

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

8.6, January 2023

6.0.7, June 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

MongoDB Inc.'s Server Side Public License v1. Prior versions were published under GNU AGPL v3.0. Commercial licenses are also available.

commercial

free development license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

MongoDB available as DBaaS (MongoDB Atlas)

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

MongoDB Atlas: Global multi-cloud database with unmatched data distribution and mobility across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, built-in automation for resource and workload optimization, and so much more.
MongoDB Flex @ STACKIT offers managed MongoDB Instances with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

Erlang

Java

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free

Although schema-free, documents of the same collection often follow the same structure. Optionally impose all or part of a schema by defining a JSON schema.

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, integer, double, decimal, boolean, date, object_id, geospatial

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

Read-only SQL queries via the MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL
HTTP REST
Prisma
proprietary protocol using JSON

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Actionscript

unofficial driver
C
C#
C++
Clojure

unofficial driver
ColdFusion

unofficial driver
D

unofficial driver
Dart

unofficial driver
Delphi

unofficial driver
Erlang
Go
Groovy

unofficial driver
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Lisp

unofficial driver
Lua

unofficial driver
MatLab

unofficial driver
Perl
PHP
PowerShell

unofficial driver
Prolog

unofficial driver
Python
R

unofficial driver
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Smalltalk

unofficial driver
Swift

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

JavaScript

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Partitioned by hashed, ranged, or zoned sharding keys. Live resharding allows users to change their shard keys as an online operation with zero downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-Source deployments with MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

typically not used, however similar functionality with DBRef possible

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional, enabled by default

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

In-memory storage engine introduced with MongoDB version 3.2

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MongoDB provides an integrated suite of cloud database and data services to accelerate...
» more

Competitive advantages

Built around the flexible document data model and unified API, MongoDB is a developer...
» more

Typical application scenarios

AI-enriched intelligent apps (Continental, Telefonica, Iron Mountain) Internet of...
» more

Key customers

ADP, Adobe, Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Auto Trader, Barclays, BBVA, Bosch, Cisco, CERN,...
» more

Market metrics

Hundreds of millions downloads, over 150,000+ Atlas clusters provisioned every month...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

MongoDB database server: Server-Side Public License (SSPL) . Commercial licenses...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.