When comparing Couchbase vs RethinkDB, the Slant community recommends RethinkDB for most people. In the question“What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?” RethinkDB is ranked 2nd while Couchbase is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose RethinkDB is:
Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Couchbase and Couchbase Mobile are open source and released under the Apache License.
Pro Easy to implement N1QL queries
Pro Ability to run ad-hoc SQL like queries on realtime big data
Couchbase N1QL allows native SQL processing over JSON data with high performance indexing for low latency queries at scale.
Pro Easy sync protocol to mobile devices
The minimal code needed to pull data down to a device
Pro Available on Windows, Linux & macOS
Pro Ability to make predefined fast queries
With Couchbase you can make "Views" of data, which are practically predefined queries which are fetched with an O(1) algorithm.
Pro Easy install
Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.
Pro Changefeeds (change listeners)
You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes.
Pro Powerful query language
RethinkDB's ReQL is a very powerful functional query language. The functional aspects of ReQL and the straightforward implementation of the Node driver for Rethinkdb make it a natural fit for Javascript developers. You no longer have to type some obscure syntax in quotes (aka SQL), your queries are just "natural" Javascript functions in the same way you would use lodash to handle your collections.
Pro Auto master promotion
Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer.
Pro CLI and web administration tools
RethinkDB has administration tools in both CLI and GUI (web app). You can view whats going on right away by going to localhost:8080. The data explorer allows you to run queries on the db.
Pro Horizontal scalability
RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharding, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency.
Pro Ease of cluster setup
You can directly tell it to shard/replicate and how many shards/replicas depending on the amount of nodes. Each node doesn't need anything except one other node's ip/port in the cluster to join and maybe the auth.
Cons
Con Vendor lock-in
Con No model mapper for Android
Couchbase does not have a model mapper for Android built-in and out of the box, instead you will have to write your own from scratch.
Con Not Compatible with couchdb
Since version 2 the sync-protocol is no longer compatible with couchdb. This makes couchbase nearly worthless
Con Cannot run queries from its CLI
Con No user accounts
This is just the database, you need to setup your own auth and user accounts (such as using Auth0).