CouchDB Myths #1: Nobody Uses It Anymore posted Wednesday, July 9, 2025 by The Neighbourhoodie Team couchdb,
“CouchDB’s old and nobody uses it anymore.” Maybe you held this impression yourself, or maybe you came across it through a colleague or over on Stack Overflow. How true is it, or does this belief reveal more about how databases are promoted these days? One thing is for sure — CouchDB users aren’t going anywhere.
Where Did the Myth Come From?
Whether investigating CouchDB as a novel user or debugging it as a pro, you’ve certainly come across discussions that echo a “CouchDB is outdated” sentiment. Like the thread linked they tend to be getting a little older by now (which already dispels it a good deal), but they remain findable nonetheless. So for the sake of future CouchDB devs, today let’s take a look at why this sentiment emerged and evaluate its accuracy.
The first thing to point out is that CouchDB doesn’t exist in a vacuum, just like our impressions of what ‘active’ looks like change depending on who is in the cohort being evaluated. CouchDB had its initial release in 2005, and at the time was the first NoSQL database, and the first to store everything in JSON. So we might ask whether the relevance of such databases have been in decline, slowly taking CouchDB with them.
It’s Not Good at What It Does
Some threads carry the idea that CouchDB progresses slowly, and therefore can’t be good at solving current problems. But is it likely that such a project would still be active at all and accepting contributions, especially under Apache? Are other NoSQL databases from the same sort of time still around? Let’s start with a couple that faded:
- ThruDB
- This was a document-oriented database with replication features that put it in a comparable class to CouchDB. It’s defunct now, but has been preserved. The project started as open source in 2006 but was mostly abandoned by 2009.
- Terrastore
- Terrastore was a distributed document database with consistency features. It started as an open source project in around 2009 and its last update was released in 2011.
If databases that existed nearby CouchDB didn’t see life beyond several years (despite much excitement), that’s a pretty good sign that CouchDB solved specific problems, became indispensable quickly, and continues to offer a unique solution. In terms of the Gartner hype cycle we could say these databases didn’t escape the trough, while CouchDB continues to plateau.
Diagram of the Gartner hype cycle. Image: by Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
What other arguments are there?
It Doesn’t Show Up As Often
We’ve taken a look at a couple of databases that had similar properties to CouchDB, but were defunct by 2011. So what survived?
Both of the projects mentioned started as open source projects and remained so. But there’s one major proprietary database tool, released in 2009, that remains one of the most popular options when it comes to document-oriented databases. There’s a chance you’ve already said it quietly, but that database is MongoDB. While you may never have heard of ThruDB and Terrastore even if you were coding at the time they were released, there’s practically no chance you haven’t heard of MongoDB.
As an open source project, CouchDB relies on volunteers. If there’s little marketing being done, you can rest assured it’s because volunteer time is being dedicated to the codebase instead. Nonetheless, it means that CouchDB isn’t promoted to you as often when you’re out gathering coding resources the way publicly traded technologies with marketing budgets are. This is true of many open source technologies: how often do you come across Adobe’s tools? What about LibreOffice? Or InkScape?
The reason you may not think CouchDB is popular could be for the same reason the verbs we all learned in school are often replaced by Photoshopping, Googling or Shazaming.
It Has Enterprise Forks
Another reason CouchDB may seem outdated is because the relationship between CouchDB, Couchbase and Cloudant could be fuzzy, leaving the impression that CouchDB is the under-maintained community version of a proprietary technology.
That couldn’t be further from the truth!
These are the proprietary tools that are often associated with CouchDB:
- Couchbase
- ‘Couch’ is a backronym for “cluster of unreliable commodity hardware”. When some of the team who had also contributed to CouchDB started a new database technology to address the distributed system problems they’d already been working with, ‘couch’ was likely to end up in the name. And that’s exactly what happened — in August 2010 Couchbase was released, and shortly after, Couchbase Server.
- Cloudant
- This one may not have ‘Couch’ in the name but you’re certain to come across it while researching CouchDB. It may even flag a concern that Cloudant maintains CouchDB, and one day you’ll be stuck having to choose to migrate or pay up if the license changes. Cloudant is an enterprise DBaaS based on CouchDB with proprietary add-ons.
Neither project is related to CouchDB in a way that poses a risk to its survival and open source standards. In fact, if you pay the CouchDB Slack a visit, you’ll discover an active community, including the Cloudant team, who contribute heavily to CouchDB and keep it a cornerstone of and open source option for distributed systems.
It’s worth pointing out that commercial products also have regular and frequent release cycles, and design accordingly. CouchDB, by contrast, in its promise for reliability and simplicity, designs its processes for fidelity and longevity, and goes to great lengths to prevent breaking changes or the need for patches.
So, is it true?
CouchDB has certainly crossed the chasm of survival — in fact, it leaped over it. CouchDB remains actively governed by the Apache Software Foundation and is characterised by an extremely loyal community. We learned in the 2024 Apache CouchDB Annual User Survey that users would sooner add a database to obtain extra features than migrate away from CouchDB entirely because of the unique (and reliable!) way that CouchDB continues to solve problems.
CouchDB might not match the contemporary mental model of a commercial database, with frequent patches. This is by virtue of a deliberate choice, to instead make software that is even more reliable, and easier and safer to upgrade.
Who’s using it?
We’ve dispelled the myth, but who is actually using it? Another reason for its longevity has to do with the projects who’ve adopted CouchDB. Commercial users are not often at liberty to speak about their tech or be named by providers, but it’s deployed in some staggering use cases commercially and academically. It’s also absolutely indispensable in the humanitarian projects it’s been used in. Suffice it to say, CouchDB has become a very important and loved technology. It’s not going anywhere — on the contrary, CouchDB continues to connect it with new users because of its approach to problem solving.
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