DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. MongoDB vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. MongoDB vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

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

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

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	421.65
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

Technical documentation

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

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

pouchdb.com/guides

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Elastic

MongoDB, Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2010

2009

2012

2001

2000

Current release

8.6, January 2023

6.0.7, June 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

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

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

MongoDB available as DBaaS (MongoDB Atlas)

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

Java

C++

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

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

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.

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Read-only SQL queries via the MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GraphQL
HTTP REST
Prisma
proprietary protocol using JSON

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

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

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

JavaScript

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

yes

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.

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

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

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional, enabled by default

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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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