When comparing Cloudant vs MarkLogic, the Slant community recommends Cloudant for most people. In the question“What are the best databases for building social network like apps?” Cloudant is ranked 6th while MarkLogic is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Cloudant is:
You can choose to host your database on a single cloud provider or you can replicate it over several different providers.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can replicate the database across several hosts
You can choose to host your database on a single cloud provider or you can replicate it over several different providers.
Pro Runs on both bare-metal and virtual machine
Users can choose whether their database instance will run on bare-metal or a virtual machine
Pro Crash friendly
The database behind Cloudant, CouchDB uses an append-only file for it's data. To restore already used up space, a compaction must happen. When this happens is up to the database maintainer.
Pro Cloud agnostic
Cloudant hosts databases with a lot of different cloud hosting providers including Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure. This way customers can choose where their database is hosted.
Pro High performance graph database
While known as a document-oriented noSQL database, MarkLogic also provides a standards-compliant triple store that can be used to enrich document-shaped data with semantic links.
Pro Enterprise strength security and transactions
The two fatal flaws of many open source solutions is lack of integrated security at the element level and full ACID transaction support. MarkLogic has both and is trusted with some of the worlds most sensitive data. It is the engine that powers healthcare.gov, which despite some early problems (not caused by MarkLogic) is an amazing technological achievement.
Pro Multi-model database
MarkLogic supports text, documents, key-value/tuple, graphs, tables and object models that don't require extensive data-modeling and normalization that is part of the lifecycle process of relational database management systems. For sites similar to LinkedIn, Facebook, IMDB and even search engines, MarkLogic provides a unique set of features that are all in one box.
Pro No ETL Required
MarkLogic can store all your enterprise data in it's original format without needing to know a schema in advanced. You can shove pretty much any structured or unstructured data directly into MarkLogic, and it will automatically index everything and make it available for future processing. Of course it is fully schema aware and will apply and enforce schema constraints when available, but the tedious normalization that is required for relational databases is not necessary.
Cons
Con Can only achieve consistency through replication and verification
Since CouchDB is considered an AP (Available, Partition-Tolerant database management system), it is not really consistent (not all clients can have the same view of the data consistently) and the only way to achieve some "eventual consistency" is through replication and verification of data.
Con Lack of experts
MarkLogic is not as popular as some of it's peers, and even though it is highly standards-based, the pool of talent that is well-versed in the underlying technology is small compared with some competing platforms (e.g, Oracle, IBM, Apache).
Con Enterprise software is not open source and can get expensive. Not for casual projects.
MarkLogic can be downloaded and implemented in development environments for free. However, for production use, it is priced for enterprises, not startups with tight budgets. Open source requires a lot more elbow grease to do the same thing.