Difference between Cloudant and CouchOne?

Question

I wonder what the difference is between Cloudant and CouchOne.

Answer 1

Good question. My quick answer:

CouchOne is lead by Damien Katz, the originator of the CouchDB Apache project. CouchOne is now focused squarely on scaling couchdb down to run efficiently on mobile devices. The goal is to leverage the p2p replication model of CouchDB to solve the sync problem on mobile.

Cloudant is founded by 3 PhD's from MIT with big-data backgrounds. Cloudant is focused squarely on scaling CouchDB up (see the open-source bigcouch project) to power data-intensive applications in the cloud. Cloudant provides scalable data as a service for high-rate, large volume online transaction processing, search and analytics.

Thus there is a real opportunity to see the CouchDB API flourish at two tremendously different scales to provide the application developer a single platform that runs on the mobile and in the cloud, with seamless data (and CouchApp!) migration between the two.

Answer 2

Update (2015)

Currently, according to Professional Services on CouchDB Wiki, there are 3 CouchDB hosting services:

• Smileupps
• Cloudant
• Iris Couch

Since this question is specifically about Cloudant and CouchOne, here's more info:

Cloudant was bought by IBM in March 2014 - see IBM Completes Acquisition of Cloudant - and continues to operate.

According to Wikipedia: "Cloudant is an IBM software product, which is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service. Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service of the same name that requires zero-configuration. Cloudant is based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the open source BigCouch project." (source)

CouchOne is not available any more. As of June 2015 http://www.couchone.com/ gives 404 Not Found (since at least March 2013), @couchone on Twitter had last tweets in May 2011 and says that "CouchOne is now Couchbase, Inc." - but please note that contrary to some marketing material the Couchbase Server is not a continuation of CouchDB - it has a different code base, licensing, philosophy, features, data and protocols.

For more info on this and an explanation of differences between things like CouchDB, CouchIO, CouchOne, Couchbase, Couchbase Server, Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase Lite, CouchApps, BigCouch, Touchbase, Membase, Memcached, MemcacheDB etc.- see the answer that I wrote to: Difference between CouchDB and Couchbase in March 2013.

Original answer (2011)

It's a late answer to a somewhat dated thread but it's a number one Google hit for "couchone and cloudant" so here's a little update.

Few days ago CouchOne announced a merge with Membase to form a new company called Couchbase. Membase is known eg. for the database behind FarmVille by Zynga so it's a mature large scale NoSQL solution and Couchbase is planned to be a technology scaling from smartphones to large data center clusters.

Cloudand on the other hand started from large scale (see Mike's comments) and while you can get a large scale solutions for more than $1000/mo, you can also get a 2GB database for $15/mo and even a smaller one for free.

There is a difference in managing the databases, CouchOne uses just Futon right now and Cloudant has a custom web interface where you can set up shared databases, virtual hosts, custom domains etc.

All in all Cloudant seems to be more mature right now and we have to see how the Couchbase develops.

The bottom line is that both CouchOne and Cloudant can be tried for free so it's probably best to try out both and see what best suits your needs.