DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MongoDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MongoDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

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	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	423.96
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.mongodb.com

Technical documentation

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

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

Developer

Elastic

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

MongoDB, Inc

Initial release

2010

2012

2017

2009

Current release

8.6, January 2023

6.0.7, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

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.

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

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.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

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

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

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP 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

Supported programming languages

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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

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

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional, enabled by default

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MongoDB provides an integrated suite of cloud database and data services to accelerate...
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Competitive advantages

Built around the flexible document data model and unified API, MongoDB is a developer...
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Typical application scenarios

AI-enriched intelligent apps (Continental, Telefonica, Iron Mountain) Internet of...
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Key customers

ADP, Adobe, Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Auto Trader, Barclays, BBVA, Bosch, Cisco, CERN,...
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Market metrics

Hundreds of millions downloads, over 150,000+ Atlas clusters provisioned every month...
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Licensing and pricing models

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