What is IBM® Cloudant®?
A fully managed, distributed database optimized for heavy workloads and fast-growing web and mobile apps, IBM Cloudant is available as an IBM Cloud® service with a 99.99% SLA. Cloudant elastically scales throughput and storage, and its API and replication protocols are compatible with Apache CouchDB for hybrid or multicloud architectures.
How it’s used
Mobile app with serverless

Mobile app with serverless
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use IBM Cloud Functions along with cognitive and data services to build a serverless back end for a mobile app.
Find anomalies in IoT data

Find anomalies in IoT data
This tutorial shows how to set up an IoT device and gather data in the IBM Watson IoT® Platform. Create visualizations and use advanced ML services to analyze historical data and detect anomalies.
Open hybrid multicloud

Open hybrid multicloud
This tutorial shows how to pair the API and powerful replication protocol of Cloudant with Apache CouchDB in a hybrid cloud environment.
Cloudant features
Cloudant details
Serverless
Instantly deploy an instance, create databases and independently scale throughput capacity and data storage to meet your application requirements.
Secure
Encrypt all data, with optional user-defined encryption key management through IBM Key Protect, and integrate with IBM Identity and Access Management.
Global availability
Get continuous availability as Cloudant distributes data across availability zones and 6 regions for app performance and disaster recovery requirements.
2022 Top Rated Awards
TrustRadius Honors IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant is recognized as a top leader across multiple categories: DBaaS, NoSQL and Non-relational Databases.

Frequently asked questions
Get answers to the most commonly asked questions about this product.
What is a document data store?
Document data stores are represented in JSON, where each document is itself a complex data structure. Documents can contain nested structures of various data types, and users can query these structures, retrieving or updating the document, or portions of it, without locking down the database. Documents are stored and retrieved through a unique primary key.
Why JSON?
JSON’s appeal stems partly from its schema, which can rapidly evolve without admin intervention. JSON offers an elegant model for persisting Java or JavaScript objects due to its affinity with JavaScript — no need for heavyweights like OpenJPA or Hibernate to build a data-layer solution. Storing a JSON document to represent a real object is fairly intuitive.
How is Cloudant different than CouchDB?
While Cloudant is API-compatible with Apache CouchDB, unlike CouchDB, Cloudant has layered additional open source technologies for full-text search and geospatial indexing capabilities. Both share a common replication protocol, so you can synchronize copies of your Cloudant data to a remote CouchDB instance — or vice versa — with a click. Explore the differences.
What is offline-first architecture?
Offline-first architecture means building an app without an internet connection; the architecture lets you interact with your app without connectivity. Using Cloudant Mobile Sync, mobile apps can collect and read data when the network is unavailable. Once the connection is established, the data will sync with Cloudant. Cloudant also works with Hoodie and PouchDB.
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