Cloudant vs Google Cloud Bigtable: What are the differences?

Cloudant: Distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for web & mobile apps. Cloudant’s distributed database as a service (DBaaS) allows developers of fast-growing web and mobile apps to focus on building and improving their products, instead of worrying about scaling and managing databases on their own; Google Cloud Bigtable: The same database that powers Google Search, Gmail and Analytics. Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail.

Cloudant and Google Cloud Bigtable can be categorized as "NoSQL Database as a Service" tools.

Some of the features offered by Cloudant are:

• Managed- Cloudant's big data experts monitor your data 24/7 to ensure its high availability and safety.
• Distributed Multi-Master Database- All read and write transactions can be synced across Cloudant's global data network without global locks, providing true high availability of your data.
• Geo-load Balancing- To keep latency low, our geo-load balancing infrastructure routes requests to the copies of the data that are geographically closest to the requestor.

On the other hand, Google Cloud Bigtable provides the following key features:

• Unmatched Performance: Single-digit millisecond latency and over 2X the performance per dollar of unmanaged NoSQL alternatives.
• Open Source Interface: Because Cloud Bigtable is accessed through the HBase API, it is natively integrated with much of the existing big data and Hadoop ecosystem and supports Google’s big data products. Additionally, data can be imported from or exported to existing HBase clusters through simple bulk ingestion tools using industry-standard formats.
• Low Cost: By providing a fully managed service and exceptional efficiency, Cloud Bigtable’s total cost of ownership is less than half the cost of its direct competition.

"JSON" is the primary reason why developers consider Cloudant over the competitors, whereas "High performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Google Cloud Bigtable.