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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that MongoDB has, at time of writing, more than 4 times the users of CouchDB. Both are document-based and have a JavaScript query language. MongoDB came out last year and CouchDB in 2005.

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I have used both. I implemented a prototype back-end in CouchDB, and it worked well for this purpose, allowing me to get up and running quickly. But I found that I needed a couple of things that they didn't support - for example, I wanted to integrate with an existing authentication system rather than use the built-in CouchDB one. It became clear that I would have to write my own middleware layer in Python or similar. Once I had made that decision, I had lost the simplicity that is CouchDB's most compelling feature and I felt I was missing out in other ways - CouchDB's REST API is less flexible than MongoDB's programmatic API for example. So I switched to MongoDB.

I'd say both gave me exactly what I needed at different times, and so I recommend both projects highly, depending on what you need. CouchDB is an excellent tool to quickly "mock up" a live back end, and a great way to learn hands on with document stores with very little upfront effort required. MongoDB seems to integrate better as part of a larger system, and provides more flexibility.

MongoDB, at least at first glance, seems easier to install than CouchDB. The Erlang dependency might be a little off-putting. That could easily explain it's apparent greater popularity.

to some extent, I decided to use couchdb because I trust apache with server stuff. I've slotted mongodb in for testing next time I have the luxury of time, though.

For me that was one of the turn-offs of CouchDB, that it had been around since 2005 and still was not considered to be production-ready as late as last year.

Despite being alpha (and now beta), CouchDB's been in production at a number of installations for years without issue.

Because the #1 goal is reliability, we've hesitated to recommend production use, until the most recent release (0.11). CouchDB 1.0 ships this summer, and is definitely a safe place to put your data.

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