DocumentDB vs eXist-db
DocumentDB
documentdb.ioeXist-db
exist-db.orgSide by side
| Figure | DocumentDB | eXist-db |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Document Databases | 8.6 (#5) | 8.8 (#4) |
| License | The project is MIT licensed. | eXist-db is open source software licensed under the LGPL and may be used in academic, non-commercial, and commercial applications. |
| Product | DocumentDB is an open-source, MongoDB-compatible document database built on PostgreSQL. | eXist-db is a NoSQL document database and application platform built around XML. |
| Security | The project lists SCRAM authentication; its gateway documentation says TLS terminates on the gateway port, whose default is 10260. | Its security system uses a Unix permissions model extended with access control lists and supports external authentication realms. |
| Support | The getting-started documentation lists Discord for community syncs, office hours, technical support, migration assistance, and best-practice sharing. | eXist Solutions offers consulting, training, application development, system setup, production monitoring, and individual SLAs on request. |
Plans
In their own words
DocumentDB
DocumentDB is an MIT-licensed, open-source document database built on PostgreSQL for MongoDB compatibility. It stores native BSON documents, supports document CRUD and PostgreSQL SQL operations, and offers single-field, multi-key, compound, text and geospatial indexes, including nested fields. Pgvector powers vector search for embeddings and similarity search. MongoDB-compatible clients and tools include mongosh, PyMongo, the official MongoDB Node.js driver and a VS Code extension. The extension can create a local database, generate credentials and save a connection. DocumentDB runs locally in Docker or on a user’s infrastructure or cloud. Its gateway supports SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication, with TLS terminating at default port 10260. Hosted packages currently cover Ubuntu 24.04 and EL9 with PostgreSQL 17 or 18 for amd64 and arm64. A Kubernetes operator for failover, replication, backups and TLS is in preview and requires Kubernetes 1.35+ and cert-manager.
eXist-db
eXist-db is a free, open-source NoSQL document database and application platform centered on XML. Its native engine stores textual or binary documents without requiring a database schema, and it is designed for self-hosted deployment on Linux, macOS, or Windows. The product implements XQuery 3.1, though some features and functions are unsupported, and RESTXQ lets developers deploy RESTful services from XQuery annotations. Its interfaces include REST-style HTTP, SOAP, XML-RPC, and WebDAV. A browser-based IDE provides syntax coloring, code completion, and error checking for application artifacts. Full-text search uses an implementation-specific Apache Lucene approach rather than the W3C XQuery and XPath Full Text 3.0 specification. Security extends Unix permissions with access control lists and external authentication realms. The software is licensed under the LGPL for academic, non-commercial, and commercial use. The documentation lists Java 8 for versions 3.x–6.x or Java 21 for version 7.x, about 500 MB of disk space, and at least 512 MB of memory.