DocumentDB vs IBM Cloudant
DocumentDB
documentdb.io
IBM Cloudant
ibm.comSide by side
| Figure | DocumentDB | IBM Cloudant |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 7 |
| Spec score · Document Databases | 8.6 (#5) | 7.7 (#18) |
| Product | DocumentDB is an open-source, MongoDB-compatible document database built on PostgreSQL. | IBM Cloudant is a managed JSON document database service based on Apache CouchDB. |
| Support | The getting-started documentation lists Discord for community syncs, office hours, technical support, migration assistance, and best-practice sharing. | Support for Standard and Dedicated plan instances is optional and provided with IBM Cloud Standard Support; Lite plan support is unavailable. |
Plans
IBM Cloudant
- LitePriced on request
- StandardPriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- EnterprisePrice not published
- LiteFree
- Dedicated HardwarePriced on request
- StandardPrice not published
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.