Azure Cosmos DB vs Cloudant: What are the differences?

Developers describe Azure Cosmos DB as "A fully-managed, globally distributed NoSQL database service". Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development. On the other hand, Cloudant is detailed as "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.

Azure Cosmos DB and Cloudant can be primarily classified as "NoSQL Database as a Service" tools.

Some of the features offered by Azure Cosmos DB are:

• Fully managed with 99.99% Availability SLA
• Elastically and highly scalable (both throughput and storage)
• Predictable low latency: <10ms @ P99 reads and <15ms @ P99 fully-indexed writes

On the other hand, Cloudant provides the following key features:

• 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.

"Best-of-breed NoSQL features" is the primary reason why developers consider Azure Cosmos DB over the competitors, whereas "JSON" was stated as the key factor in picking Cloudant.