--- title: CouchDB Reviews meta_title: 'CouchDB Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 64 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how CouchDB works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 3.9 review_count: 64 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-12' parent_category: name: NoSQL Databases url: https://www.g2.com/categories/nosql-databases --- # CouchDB Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Document Databases](https://www.g2.com/categories/document-databases) **Average Rating:** 3.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 64 ## About CouchDB CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. ## CouchDB Reviews ### 1. We developed our first version of our product PocketLabs with it. We used CouchBase with is a fork. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eddie A. | Associate Staff Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** Master to master replication Automatic resharding Scalability in general Couchbase admin. Read speed. Simple to use and administrate. Multi version concurrency control **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Eventual consistency, Limits the type of projects you can use it for. Great for mostly read apps. I would not use it for apps that require frequent updates. Limited querying capabilities. Not multi key. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** The problem I see in general is with the word no-sql. CouchDb is no-sql but so is redis and mongoDb and they are very different. No-sql offers specific solutions for specific problems. This is different from the SQL world where you solve everything with SQL. People that live with sql typically install their database even before they receive specs. That being said CouchDB is designed to serve information with speed and redundancy in a scenario where you are mostly reading data. You will also have a limited freedom regarding querying (even if you script). It would be a fantastic DB for a catalog but be wary if you need need heavy updates as it takes some time for data to propagate, or if you need to run reports that have not yet been defined. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Its fast and simple to develop. Great for startups and prototypes. You can use it as a very large cache. You can use it as a versioning system for documents. By design its awesome for syncing data between apps. ### 2. Overall a pretty savvy DBMS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David S. | Senior .NET Developer, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** What I liked best about starting off using couchdb was replication. This fits well with a client server application that needs to sync to the cloud. Also, I liked the restful API that is available and the out of the box authenticat ion is great. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** I dislike having to create views and remember the specific key value pair that the view provides. Also, it would be great to support some type of tradional join as you get in a sql db. My code is more verbose bc of this and I'm not able to do the heavy lifting server side. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** Do not use couch if using very relational data as your business logic will become a nightmare and unmaintainable. You might be able to understand Mongo better if coming from the RDBMS world, but overall there is great support for this dbms (i.e. documentation is excellent and administrative tools are pretty good) **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** As mentioned, I am benefiting from client-server replication and user authentication. Also, I wanted an abstraction layer between my db and my application and I get that with the restful api. Bc of the restful api, I was able to pick it up quickly. ### 3. User and admin of CouchDB and BigCouch **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shawn P. | Co-founder, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** CouchDB views are very fast and the REST interface is simple and easy to integrate with. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** View corruption is a real problem with larger views and rebuilding them can take significant time. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** I recommend CouchDB for smaller datasets. We tried using it with our server monitoring results but view corruption made it impossible to maintain. You're also likely to run out of disk space since large data sets are stored on-disk very inefficiently. For smaller data, it's an excellent choice. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Schema-less data retention and fast pre-built views are what drew us to CouchDB. ### 4. CouchDB for analytics on a large distributed video streaming service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harshith K. | Graduate Teaching Assistant, Higher Education, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** CouchDB is a great document NoSQL datastore with excellent data aggregation capabilities. I have used it for append-only data (analytics) on a distributed video streaming service hosted on the cloud. It is very simple yet powerful. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Like any other document based datastore, it does not work well with relational data. It is best used for data that is loosely coupled and works well with append-only data. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** Play around with the aggregations and the distributed nature. This is extremely useful and can lead to some creative solutions to a lot of problems. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used CouchDB to simplify analytics collection and aggregation for a video streaming service. It enabled on-demand availability of analytics data instead of the previous batch processed aggregation implemented on a relational database. ### 5. Couch! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 15, 2016 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** I love what couch offers like every other SoSQL DB out there; schemaless data. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** They could make a better security solution out of the box. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Service based databases. ### 6. Database Administrator **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joe B. | Software Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** I like how easy it was to setup in a Windows environment. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Not a huge fan of the front end tool Futon. It was hard editing documents **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** If you are using a Windows or .NET environment get your hands on the CouchDB .NET toolset **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used it for the Swing and day trading. I would collect daily and historical stock market data. ### 7. 5 months, storing 100GB daily uncompressed html files **Rating:** 0.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh S. | Senior Software Engineer, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** Automatic compression/decompression. Storing files was not too intensive but building views and especially compacting the db to "really remove" old files could barely process as fast as we were storing information **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Horrible performance. Even in a raid it had serious problems with the cpu and harddrive io cost of storing our files, building views, and deleting old files. We switched to compressing files and building the view ourselves while storing the files in Amazon S3 and all our headaches went away entirely. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** Don't. I wouldn't doubt it can be used effectively but we didn't see that in our usage **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Storing massive amounts of retrievable html files ### 8. CouchDB, nice to work with, hard to run. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 03, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** The API is pleasant, the internal tooling (futon) helps to prototype things. There is a good amount of clients for almost any programming language. Most parts of operating it are also nice (e.g. things like creating backups). **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Under a sustained write load, the compaction of the copy on write approach couldn't catch up anymore. Especially on Amazon EBS I had problems initially where the system never finished compacting. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** Make sure you are ok with the limited query ability and do a load test beforehand. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** A datastore with low operational overhead (single server if possible) that can be used and maintained by a single developer. Something with easy introspection and a source for a more query oriented system (solr, elasticsearch) ### 9. CouchDB Usage Review @ Prominent Category Specific Search Company **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** Easy to get started with and the HTTP API was solid. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Re-indexing every time we wanted to make a change on the data we needed to view. Best practices on scaling was not available at the time as well. Also, security concerns didn't seem to be a priority on the version we worked with. **Recommendations to others considering CouchDB:** Give it a try and do it in a scenario that is very close to what you really plan on using it for. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed something to store documents instead of just relational data. It was going to be used for a dynamic CMS built to integrate with an existing product. ### 10. Relax and the rest is taken care!!!! **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Market Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** It is a Document store with built in Map reduce. Store json documents whicthout worrying about the schema or type of the columns. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Scalability is a big factor which worries. The next thing would be stability and ease of querying without using any other search platform on top of couchDb. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use couchDb as a Document store. It allows us to store native json documents from various social media networks and analyse it later. ### 11. Decent document database for data analysis **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** User interface is simple and easy to use and provides very useful insights. MapReduce works great for data analysis. **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** The lack of a command line interface is a disappointing coming from a SQL and MongoDB background. The JSON data model isn't as robust as Mongo's BSON. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Storing application data and analytics. Easy to set up and use. MapReduce feels like an intuitive tool for for data analytics. ### 12. CouchDB for a REST based hobby project **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** The browser based UI and javascript support **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** If I want to query documents based on a field which is not unique, I have to create a temporary or permanent views. I believe creating temporary views for such simple common scenarios is not so developer friendly **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was a hobby project. I was learning basics of web application development with NoSQL DBs ### 13. Did not scale for our needs **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** Easy to setup and ramp up time is pretty fast. REST interface and accessing documents by via REST service is a clear winner. Storing unstructured data as document and having to write mapreduce routines for querying **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** Did not scale well when our data reached over 100GB. **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** We wanted to store user session data for our public facing website. ### 14. Good Concept but needs improvement **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2015 **What do you like best about CouchDB?** good repository for documents, allows storing them from the websites **What do you dislike about CouchDB?** It doesn't support queries like relational db queries **What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** searching and storing documents ## CouchDB Discussions - [What language does CouchDB use?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-language-does-couchdb-use) - [What is the difference between MongoDB and CouchDB?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-difference-between-mongodb-and-couchdb) - [What is CouchDB good for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-couchdb-good-for) - [What is the next feature couch db is planning in next release and how will we be beniffited?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/29348-what-is-the-next-feature-couch-db-is-planning-in-next-release-and-how-will-we-be-beniffited) - [How I can be a contributor to CouchDB core platform ?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/28862-how-i-can-be-a-contributor-to-couchdb-core-platform) - [View CouchDB pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/couchdb/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-18+05%3A39%3A48+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=f4190a99-ac55-4efb-b850-4120c4ca9c12&secure%5Btoken%5D=4fa210e8f68656c31e08497d6f633a69ec3b0a1385131859309800caab966126&format=llm_user) ## CouchDB Features **Management** - Real-Time Analytics - Solution Integration - Infrastructure Compatibility - Monitoring **Data Management** - Data Model - Data Types - Built - In Search - Event Triggers **Management** - Disaster Recovery - Remote Backup - Storage Formats - Scheduled Backups - On-Demand Restoration **Solution Provision** - System Failover - Pay by Usage - Service Provision **Availability** - Auto Sharding - Auto Recovery - Data Replication **Reporting** - Activity Monitoring - Documentation - Alerts/Notifications **Performance** - Query Optimization **Security** - Data Encryption - Security and Compliance - Deduplication **Security** - Role-Based Authorization - Authentication - Audit Logs - Encryption **Support** - Multi-Model - Operating Systems - BI Connectors **Database Features** - Storage - Availability - Stability - Scalability - Security - Data Manipulation - Query Language ## Top CouchDB Alternatives - [Couchbase](https://www.g2.com/products/couchbase/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (143 reviews) - [Redis Software](https://www.g2.com/products/redis-software/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (130 reviews) - [RethinkDB](https://www.g2.com/products/rethinkdb/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (15 reviews)