--- 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: '2026-08-09' parent\_category: name: NoSQL Databases url: https://www.g2.com/categories/nosql-databases --- # CouchDB Reviews & Product Details CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. * * * Seller [The Apache Software Foundation](https://www.g2.com/sellers/the-apache-software-foundation) Discussions [CouchDB Community](https://www.g2.com/products/couchdb/discuss) Solution Type Best-of-Breed Show More ## Value at a Glance Averages based on real user reviews. ### Time to Implement 1 month ### Return on Investment 4 months [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/couchdb/pricing) ## Top-Rated Alternatives [ ![Couchbase](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Couchbase") Couchbase 4.3/5(151) ](https://www.g2.com/products/couchbase/reviews) [ ![Redis Software](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Redis Software") Redis Software 4.5/5(136) ](https://www.g2.com/products/redis-software/reviews) [ ![RethinkDB](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "RethinkDB") RethinkDB 4.3/5(15) ](https://www.g2.com/products/rethinkdb/reviews) [ View All Alternatives ](https://www.g2.com/products/couchdb/competitors/alternatives) ## User Insights Average based on 64 real user reviews. Implementation Time 1 month Perceived Cost $$$$$ [Log in to unlock pricing and user insights](/login) ![Verified User in Computer Software](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Computer Software") UC Verified User in Computer Software Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 3/10/2016 "Development Stagnation" 2/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? CouchDB is well-designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: mobile sync. It does this job fairly well, given other tools like PouchDB which can be used to sync across the two. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? CouchDB is lacking in other features when compared to alternative document databases like MongoDB. No document-based security options, no backend tools or connectors, no builtin support for other platforms. Moreover, there is substantially less documentation when compared to other platforms. Also: performance-wise, CouchDB does not compare to other database engines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: If you are going to use CouchDB, consider a commercial variant like CouchBase, otherwise MongoDB will be cheaper overall. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? We were looking for a document database to be the data backend for a hybrid web app. The app needed to work offline, so we considered CouchDB (and CouchBase) to do document sync. However, security and performance of MongoDB led us to choose it, as the app has a substantial amount of processing which is required. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Mathias F.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Mathias F.") MF Mathias F. Senior Software Engineer Internet Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 2/24/2016 "Not even close to MongoDB" 1/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? Apache has good ideas, most of them are very useful. CouchDB is one of those good ideas, but I wouldn't classify it as useful. It's good to have a company as Apache supporting the tool, I think it has a great future, but we still haven't found it's value. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? It resolves a non-existent problem. Why would I use CouchDB and not MongoDB or ElasticSearch? It's still not clear to me. I also found the documentation extremely boring and old school and the books I found do not seem interesting. The community is very small, I had trouble finding answers to basic questions I had during the time I was trying it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: If you find it useful, good for you. I'd prefer MongoDB and ElasticSearch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? I'm always looking for good database tools for various projects and modules. I currently use MySQL, MongoDB, RedShift and ElasticSearch. I considered CouchDB but ended up discarding it since I didn't think it adds anything new. So, my business problems were not solved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerSource: Seller invite ![Verified User in Marketing and Advertising](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Marketing and Advertising") AM Verified User in Marketing and Advertising Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 3/10/2016 "It's simple yet a very powerful noSQL database" 4.5/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? I like couchdb because it is light weight and easy to deploy. The web UI also makes it quick to test map reduce functions against your data. Because couchdb is restful integrating it with web apps is very easy. Replicating couchdb is also very easy which is nice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? I would like couchdb to have a better documentation on tuning it for high connection usage. Also replication is nice for a flat model but it would be nice to see some way of seeing easily if replication is delayed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: There are a lot of good books on couchdb that are on amazon. Sometimes the documentation on the web is a little disconnected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? I am solving issues of storing unstructured data that I need to add to dynamically but may not know in what way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Ido R.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Ido R.") IR Ido R. Director of Software Development Internet Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 3/23/2016 "Migrate from SQL Server to CouchDB" 5/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? CouchDB is the simplest database I've ever worked with and one of the most powerful. It uses HTTP verbs for interact with the database which is very intuitive and clear. The query mechanism is very different from RDBMS and has learning curve but once you get the hang of it it's really amazing what you can accomplish with it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? The admin interface is pretty young and has limitations such as it hard to search, at least at the beginning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: Read the definitive guide before implement your project. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? I was in charge of developing a web-based application and as usual requirements changed. The fact I didn't had to explicitly define a schema ahead of time really help move really fast. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite DL Dave L. CTO & Co-founder Computer Software Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 9/3/2015 "CouchDB is excellent NoSQL technology" 5/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? The best feature of CouchDB is it's simplicity and use of familiar technology and concepts: - A RESTful API means I can use any language to access it (even using shell and curl). - It plays well in the HTTP-based world with things like proxy servers, load balancers, and SSL offloading. - Map/reduce functions written in Javascript allow me to create dynamic web pages via lists & shows. - APIs to assist in the integration of CouchDB with other technologies: \* change API lets me connect to Elasticsearch using logstash \* os\_daemons support lets me integrate external apps and services into CouchDB environment - Replication is simple and powerful in both master-master and master-slave modes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? #1 issue with using CouchDB is lack of consolidated documentation on how to solve issues. Forgive me authors, but the books out there are not great. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of time searching for answers. If this is your first NoSQL/document database, prepare for a learning curve mostly on your own. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: Consider how fast the technologies in your stack change and the impact of these changes. CouchDB is based around common and well-know technologies: HTTP, JSON, Javascript. When we started with CouchDB, we did not plan on using logstash or Elasticsearch. But we use both now and the integration was trivial. We can use Postman for experimenting and testing. These are just two examples of how easy it was to make CouchDB work with other things - an effort that would have been much harder if CouchDB had a binary interface, or didn't use JSON, or required us to leanr a new language to write our m/r functions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? We are capturing large amounts of unstructured data from hundreds of remote locations and at greatly varying rates. The devices sourcing this data range from IoT (Raspberry Pi) to very large servers. We process around 500GB of new or modified data per hour - CouchDB handles this fine. CouchDB is also used for simple messaging between systems (using change API). And we use replication to distribute software updates out to remote sites. This provides a simple and "free" reliable mechanism to update many sites automatically. We use M/Rfor simple, single-term searches and for summary displays of data (using shows & lists). We use logstash to send data from CouchDB to Elasticsearch for more complex & fulltext searches. Benefits have been numerous: we have scaled horizontally and vertically several times with no issues. Performance of CouchDB is excellent on mediocre hardware. CouchDB has proved to be very reliable and immune to issue caused by bugs or network errors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Computer Software](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Computer Software") AC Verified User in Computer Software Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 3/10/2016 "Using CouchDB nearly daily for last 5 years." 3/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? Stable and smart replication, especially in pair with PouchDB, and full REST API. Formal documentation is full and well structured. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? Built-in Javascript query server is slooooow. Overall CRUD performance is also quiet weak. Product site looks bit outdated and messy and is not focused on users‘ needs. New 2.0 preview is at least not faster then previous version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: Look at in-memory implementations + node.js or other webserver in front. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? We are building distributed systems operating in unfriendly environment – carrier and power loss, unstable transmission rates and so on. CouchDB helps a lot. Also we use couchapp features a little and build small static sites using CouchDB. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Marketing and Advertising](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Marketing and Advertising") UM Verified User in Marketing and Advertising Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 5/12/2016 "Fast read speed - ideal for write once read many data" 4.5/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? Super fast read speed and flexibility of storing data as JSON strings. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? Not a dislike, but this database isn't suitable for storing data such as images. It's meant for fast reading smaller chunks of data quickly. Also write speeds are fast but not blazing. It's not a fault, but something you need to consider depending on your application Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: As with any database - choose wisely and think about exactly what your requirements are Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? Storing data such as user profiles, OAuth tokens etc. Written once (or not so often) and read many times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Aaron R.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Aaron R.") AR Aaron R. Software Engineer Defense & Space Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 7/15/2015 "CouchDB is a great document store but is not designed for search" 3/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? In many ways, I found CouchDB to be a web developer's dream database. With an HTTP interface for every aspect of its API and the Futon admin app built right in, it's incredibly easy to create and browse documents -- far easier than finding a client to browse your SQL holdings. The simple yet powerful map-reduce interface really adds a lot of value as well. Overall, I found CouchDB to be a great solution if you need the flexibility of a schema-less, JSON document store, and you are interested in very well defined queries of some of your attributes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? While the map-reduce interface provides easy indexing for specific queries, CouchDB is not designed for search. Separating "queries" from "search" is the important aspect here for me. I see CouchDB as an excellent choice when you can define indexes that slice data in a very specific way across a handful of defined attributes. However, most of my apps lately tend to be search related, with the need to query across many dynamic fields at once. They also tend to require spatial, full text, and metadata (range, etc.) filters simultaneously and CouchDB just doesn't offer that. For that reason, we've migrated to Elasticsearch as our primary data store instead. Also, while the ability to replicate data across nodes is great, in general we didn't really end up using it and probably would have preferred a clustering solution instead of a full replication. If you are not using this feature, it can also get in the way a bit due to the overhead of carrying around potentially lots of revision metadata. For instance, we found it difficult at times to find ideal maintenance windows to perform database compaction of our revisions because we were very write heavy throughout the day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: I highly recommend looking at using Elasticsearch if you need real search capabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? I've grown to really like schema-less JSON data stores over SQL, even if I have data that has relationships. To me, "relationship" does not imply the need for relational databases. There's nothing wrong with having attributes that act like foreign keys in your document. There's no SQL-like join available in CouchDB, but for me, the simplicity of having one stop shopping and getting all attributes in a single document by denormalizing is a great win. I think organizing our data in this way has greatly simplified our data structures and increased the time to market for some of our API features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Weldys S.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Weldys S.") WS Weldys S. CEO Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 2/19/2016 "CouchDB is good noSQL database " 2.5/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? Use CouchDB is a sensation of freedom from tables or SQL rules. Your app will be able to be more flexible Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? CouchDB use your all disk if you do not be careful. You index system could be dangerous and freeze you system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: Learn some noSQL before use any noSQL database. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? With CouchDB I create an app and I have a great performance. But I had to learn advanced points to gain some disk space Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Sandeep R.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Sandeep R.") SR Sandeep R. Software Engineer Intern Marketing and Advertising Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 7/22/2015 "Used CouchDB platform for one of the Mobile App project" 4/5 What do you like best about CouchDB? Firstly, CouchDB is very easy to learn and implement. It has rich api's and is well documented, easy to follow manual and installation guide with clear examples. I have used CouchDB java clients Ektorp and CouchDB4J for implementation and is very easy to implement. What I really liked about CouchDB was the Futon interface, it gives live map of the NoSQL database, it is easy to track the Collection objects, modify them on the fly and also gives quick view of the entire schema Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about CouchDB? CouchDB is really if the requirement is to build a light weight database structure, keep it simple and performance is priority, but then again this holds good for small scale requirements. Unlike MongoDB which I feel is much more robust than CouchDB, provides various options for implementation, there are options for replication, sharding, monitoring and has provides feature rich interfaces which CouchDB lacks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering CouchDB: Use CochDB, if your requirement is to build an application with light weight database ,performance needs and quick implementation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is CouchDB solving and how is that benefiting you? I have used CouchDB for a small Mobile application, which required storing dynamic content of varied length. Benefits realized after using this product 1. Easy maintenance 2 Performance 3. Scalablity Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ## Pricing Insights Averages based on real user reviews. ### Time to Implement 1 month ### Return on Investment 4 months ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/couchdb/pricing) CouchDB Comparisons ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_e4926e193556016dcba45bf50c6ad612/couchbase.png "Product Avatar Image") Couchbase 4.3/5(151) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/couchdb-vs-couchbase) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_131c279a0a8faf5615b1f91696037b66/cassandra.jpeg "Product Avatar Image") Cassandra 4.1/5(35) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/cassandra-vs-couchdb) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_6c0bceb4bba558e94f5d215881182f3a/redis-software.png "Product Avatar Image") Redis Software 4.5/5(136) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/couchdb-vs-redis-software) ## Work at The Apache Software Foundation? 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