When comparing RethinkDB vs MarkLogic, the Slant community recommends RethinkDB for most people. In the question“What are the best databases for building social network like apps?” RethinkDB is ranked 7th while MarkLogic is ranked 11th. 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 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.
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 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).
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.