DBMS > CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. PouchDB

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.

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

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#107	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.35
Rank	#116	Overall
	#22	Document stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

github.com/google/leveldb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2005

2012

2011

2014

2012

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

1.23, February 2021

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

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

Data scheme

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

JavaScript

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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