CouchDB in 2026: Apache CouchDB User Survey Results posted Wednesday, June 10, 2026 by The Neighbourhoodie Team AnnouncementNewsCouchDB

The results are in! And we can’t wait to take a look at what has been happening over the past year and what’s changed since the last survey.

Use Cases#

As part of a p2p application, [CouchDB] was installed on about 100 computers WITHOUT ANY data corruption in either sync or processing.

In the latest survey, a greater proportion of people are using CouchDB as a sync engine and in distributed use cases: supporting field teams, offline sync for patchy internet connections, a data store you can access from all your devices. CouchDB already speaks web, thanks to its HTTP API, so no middleware is needed to set a lot of this up.

While CouchDB is just a great database to use if you’re looking for reliable data handling (and one that lends itself to getting up and running quickly) it does something very special. Thanks to its replication protocol, CouchDB provides a sync engine without wrangling additional libraries or CRDTs. There’s a good chance you’ve come across the concept of a sync engine already — especially given that snappy server responses and resilient offline functionality is becoming an expectational norm (think “work on this document offline” buttons or keeping your audiobook progress when you open your listening app in a tunnel). It turns out, more problems are sync problems than we may have realised, or dared to admit to ourselves at the top of a project. One responder shared:

Around 50 CouchDB Nodes (Not one Cluster) Many DBs with around 20,000,000 Docs. All problems of the old system (mainly replication problems) fixed [sic]. Much less work for operations

New users have recently been given their CouchDB introduction by way of Obsidian, the notetaking app that lets you sync across devices. If you follow the CouchDB Digest, you’ll know there are a wealth of tutorials to get sync set up using CouchDB, to avoid paying premium fees (for example, check out this video tutorial that was included in the April digest).

CouchDB also has a sibling technology — PouchDB — that works as a syncing partner in the frontend, lovingly known as the database in the browser and a pioneer of the thick browser. It is the number one choice, according to current users, for a technology that replicates with CouchDB.

If you decide to give CouchDB a try, check out our guide to CouchDB Minihosting.

Features#

In the previous survey, from 2024, the loyalty of users stood out: CouchDB users tend to keep using it once they try it, another testament to its ease-of-use. For that reason, the list of most-loved features has changed little since the last survey.

In descending order of mention count, here are the CouchDB features people love most:

• Simplicity
• Resilient clustering
• Stability
• The community and developers
• HTTP API and semantics
• Ease of deployment

Unsurprisingly, feature requests reflect the increase in distributed use cases, including a reshard manager, replication tooling, enhanced sync information and selective sync.

If you already need help with these topics, do take a look at our First Steps: Sharding in CouchDB guide.

You can also follow along with our tutorial to build a real-time Kanban tool with CouchDB and Svelte to get a preview of automatic and manual conflict resolution solutions.

Challenges#

Querying continues to be a divisive topic.

For many people responding to both the last and the current survey, MapReduce and Views are their most-loved CouchDB features. MapReduce offers performance advantages, lets you write custom functions and works with PouchDB, while Views enables you to make extractions and calculations on your data. For some users, these features are their least-loved, and the reason that SQL-like queries rank highly for most-requested features.

If this sounds familiar, don’t miss Structured Query Server, a tool we developed to help you achieve complex SQL queries with CouchDB, without compromising on performance.

That’s it for 2026!#

Do head to the CouchDB Blog for more analysis and to check out the executive summary. Thank you to all who shared their feedback, and thank you to everyone who helps bring CouchDB to the world.