Couchbase Server

Couchbase Server is a distributed JSON document database with a key-value layer, managed caching, purpose-built indexers and a SQL-like query engine. It is developed by Couchbase, Inc.

It is available in two editions. Enterprise Edition is under a commercial subscription licence. Community Edition is under a free licence for non-commercial or departmental use, limited to clusters of up to five nodes, and it does not allow cross data centre replication (XDCR). This is a restricted licence rather than an open source one, so organisations expecting to scale beyond five nodes or to use it commercially will need the Enterprise Edition.

The database can be run self-managed, and the vendor also provides Couchbase Capella, a database-as-a-service. Capella pricing is published as hourly rates per node: the Basic tier starts from $0.15 per hour per node, and further tiers are listed from $0.35, $0.49 and $0.86 per hour per node. The names of tiers beyond Basic and Developer Pro were not confirmed, so buyers should check what each includes before comparing offers.

The latest release is 8.0.3, dated September 2026. Earlier releases in the series were 8.0.2 in June 2026 and 8.0.1 in March 2026, which shows a roughly quarterly maintenance cadence. Release notes are published in the vendor's documentation.