MongoDB vs CouchDB: Open Source NoSQL and Document Databases Comparison

MongoDB vs CouchDB: Open Source NoSQL and Document Databases Comparison

MongoDB and CouchDB are both document-oriented databases. MongoDB and CouchDB are the best examples of open source NoSQL database. Aside from both storing documents though, it turns out that they don't share much in common. There are a lot of difference between MongoDB and CouchDB in terms of implementation of their data-model, interface, object storage, replication methods etc. 

As we say, MongoDB and CouchDB are both document-oriented free and open source databases, the word "document" does not mean a word processing file or a PDF. Rather, a document is a data structure defined as a collection of named fields. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is currently the most widely used notation for defining documents within document-oriented databases. JSON's advantage as an object notation is that, once you comprehend its syntax -- and JSON is remarkably easy to grasp -- then you have all you need to define what amounts to the schema of a document database. That's because, in a document database, each document carries its own schema -- unlike an RDBMS, in which every row in a given table must have the same columns.

In this article "MongoDB vs CouchDB", I have tried to make a comparison between MongoDB and CouchDB and figured out following difference between these two Free, Open Source, NoSQL document oriented databases: 

Data Model: MongoDB and CouchDB are both document oriented databases. MongoDB is JSON based while CouchDB is BSON based.

Interface: MongoDB uses custom protocol over TCP/IP while CouchDB uses HTTP/REST protocol.

Object Storage: MongoDB database contains collections and those collections contain documents while CouchDB directly contains all the documents.

Implementation Language: MongoDB is written in C++ while CouchDB is written in Erlang.

Server operating systems: MongoDB can operate on Linux, OS X, Solaris and Windows platforms while CouchDB can operate on Android, BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris and Windows.

Supported programming languages: MongoDB supports a lot of programming languages like Actionscript, C, C#, C++, Clojure, ColdFusion, D, Dart, Delphi, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, Lua, MatLab, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, Prolog, Python, R, Ruby, Scala and Smalltalk. CouchDB supports lesser programming languages as compared to MongoDB. Programming languages supported by CouchDB are C, C#, ColdFusion, Erlang, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, Lua, Objective-C, OCaml, Perl, PHP, PL/SQL, Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. 

Replication: MongoDB supports only Master-Slave replication. On the other hand, CouchDB supports Master-Master Replication as well as Master-Slave Replication.

Triggers: MongoDB does not support triggers while CouchDB does.

Developer: MongoDB is developed by MongoDB, Inc. MongoDB was initially released in 2009. CouchDB is developed by Apache Software Foundation. CouchDB was initially release in 2005.