When comparing Orchestrate vs Cloudant, the Slant community recommends Cloudant for most people. In the question“What are the best NoSQL database as a service providers?” Cloudant is ranked 2nd while Orchestrate is ranked 4th. 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 Effortless/Automatic Scaling
Orchestrate was built for scale. Orchestrate is a full-fledged distributed data system, provided as a multi-tenant service. There is no need to manage finite server resources like disk space, CPU, or memory
Pro Already set up for you
Orchestrate is a Database-as-a-Service, so there is no downloading, installation, or any other administration. It also makes configuration management and deployment easy.
Pro Great Node.js support
Orchestrate.js is a first class client for Node.js applications
Pro Fault Tolerance Baked In
As a DBaaS, Orchestrate manages replicas and sharding across multiple machines. Additionally, daily backups are managed by the company.
Pro Multiple Query types at Low Latencies
No other database provides Full-Text-Search, Time-Series, Graph, and Key/Value APIs. Moreover, as a DBaaS, the queries are pre-optimized for low latencies. Consistently under 10ms for any query.
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.
Cons
Con Data are not on your server
Since it's a DBaaS, your data are completely on their server. It cannot be run on your server. Backup is handled by them as well, which may be good or not depending on your needs.
Con Not Open Source
Orchestrate is not an open source solution.
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.