First of all — thank you to all who responded to the survey! It’s great to have heard (read) from so many of you, we appreciate your insights and look forward to sharing them. This post will share some trends and interpretations; for a description of results please take a look at the executive summary, or consult original responses:

📕 2025-2026 Apache CouchDB User Survey Results Executive Summary

📊 Raw results in a read-only Google Sheet

This survey saw fewer respondents overall compared to the last, roughly ¾ of the previous survey. Last time we could make some quantitative inferences about community and adoption, but this time around it feels more interesting and appropriate to look closer at what the qualitative data says about how usage has changed.

CouchDB Use Cases 

CouchDB is stellar at supporting distributed use cases, but a greater proportion of respondents described using CouchDB in distributed or cloudless scenarios in this survey. Additionally, fewer respondents are using CouchDB for personal projects, and the number of people using it for both has decreased slightly (around 5%). It’s tempting to think that given the volatility of the hosting and cloud sector at present, teams are using CouchDB to self-adminiser cloud alternatives to fit their needs. Far more people are using an additional database with CouchDB this time around, which could confirm this.

There’s also been an interesting and clear change in language: the phrase “offline sync” made a repeat appearance in this survey, and was absent from the last. As local-first software design has gained popularity, so have searches for terms like “sync engine” and “offline sync”. Again, this is a positive signal that CouchDB continues to be found for the use cases it supports well, even as related language and trends change.

Given the popularity of live-sync personal productivity solutions that use CouchDB, such as Obsidian, and the proliferation of related tutorials, it did come as a slight surprise to see a decline of use in personal projects. It could be that we heard back from fewer users who don’t rely on CouchDB for commercial work this time, a tendency that might not be too unlikely. 

CouchDB Features

In the last survey, around 30% of feature requests focused on querying and indexing. This time around, querying and indexing still lead requested features — though to a lesser degree than in the last survey — but mentions related to sync features grew in number. New sync mentions in the features section of this survey were “sync status feedback” and “replication filtering”. There was also a request for a “reshard manager”. 

More informative error messages were also a recurring theme in this survey. If you’re comfortable with Erlang and have been looking for a way to contribute, this is a good place to start, and one that would be well-appreciated. 

CouchDB Documentation

While fewer respondents said “no” in response to the question “Do you know where to go for help/learning/on-boarding for CouchDB?”, more people said “maybe” this time around: 29% compared with 17.3% in 2024. At first this was a bit of a head-scratcher for me to interpret, until I considered that LLM-served answers probably result in people finding and perusing blogs less frequently. In the last survey, people mentioned the CouchDB Blog, Couch Architects, Neighbourhoodie and Cloudant Blog, as well as Slack. In this survey, people overwhelmingly rely on Slack and AI helpers when not using the CouchDB documentation or API reference. This is probably a good moment to segway…

The CouchDB Blog now features a monthly digest — a collection of articles, videos and tools related to CouchDB, PouchDB and sometimes Offline First. It often includes tutorials and feature spotlights, two content types respondents would like to see more of. If you want to put together tutorials or show off how you’re using CouchDB for your use case, we would love to mention you! 

When we announced the last survey results we also piloted a form to simplify user story submission. It helped us add 3 new stories to the blog since the last survey:

• Martin Junek told us how he uses CouchDB to automate fishing reports as vessels drift in and out of network coverage. Read it »
• Simon Lucy shows how CouchDB works as a data store for the knowledge management app Zettel. Read it » 
• Chirag Moradiya offers a real-time, offline-first tool that helps micro and small businesses operate. Read it » 

If you’ve considered being a CouchDB storyteller, the form is open for your submission! We would love to hear more about how you use CouchDB. 

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts and experiences with the CouchDB project and community. And thank you to all contributors for the releases that were a part of this survey. We’ll see you here again soon for the next CouchDB Digest 👋