What's your current data size? How much do you think it would grow over a period of next 5 years? NoSQL is not a panacea. It has it's own pros and cons. Can you forsake consistency over availability or vice-versa? Understand CAP guarantees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem ) and the trade offs that you can make, before making the decision of migrating to NoSQL. Ok, here's the comparison of Mongo and CouchDB. Mongo: JSON based document store(BSON actually when it's stored in the file system!) Sharding, Journalling and Replication(Master/Slave) support Different storage engines(MMap, WireTiger etc.) for different use cases(Is your system write heavy or read heavy) 16MB is the max size limit per document, use GridFS if you're planning to store huge files Javascript based querying No joins or transactional support, you can still perform atomic operations Tuneable consistency through settings like Read Preference, Write Concern Text and geo-spatial search features It does support Map/Reduce type of queries CP system from CAP standpoint CouchDB: Again, document store, but store the data in custom binary format Multi-master replication MVCC system, hence offers ACID semantics AP system from CAP standpoint Hope this helps!