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RavenDB

The fully transactional NoSQL document database

As of 30 August 2026, RavenDB is free to use. RavenDB is an open-source document-oriented database written in C#. Softwr lists it under Databases. RavenDB is made by Hibernating Rhinos, launched in 2010, available on Linux, Windows, macOS, Self-hosted.

Overview

What RavenDB does

RavenDB is an open-source document-oriented database written in C#. It is cross-platform and offers a flexible data model with built-in multi-document ACID transactions, advanced indexing, full-text search, and easy distributed clustering for high availability.

What people use it for

  • Running a distributed document database with ACID transactions
  • Self hosting a multi node database cluster on your own hardware
  • Replicating operational data out to analytics systems through ETL

The honest half

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about RavenDB.

  • The free Developer licence bars commercial use and expires every 6 months, requiring renewal
  • The free Community licence caps a customer at 60 cores and forces you to stay on the latest major version
  • The Professional licence is limited to a single database, a 5 node cluster, 40 cores and 240 GB RAM
  • Sharding across nodes, ETL to OLAP, Elasticsearch and Kafka, and data archival are Enterprise only
  • Enterprise and AI licence pricing is contact us only with no published rate

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of RavenDB

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Pricing

What RavenDB costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Community

Free

  • 3 cores
  • 6GB RAM
  • Community support

Professional

$499 /yr

  • Production use
  • Professional support
  • Advanced features

Capabilities

Features

  • ACID Transactions

  • Auto-indexing

  • Full-text Search

  • Graph Queries

  • Distributed Counters

  • Time Series

  • Document Compression

  • .NET

    Integration with .NET

  • Node.js

    Integration with Node.js

  • Java

    Integration with Java

  • Python

    Integration with Python

  • Go

    Integration with Go

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is RavenDB free or open source?

RavenDB is open source under the AGPLv3 license and available on GitHub. It also offers a free developer license with enterprise-level features limited to 9 cores, 36GB max RAM, 3 nodes, and non-commercial use.

Source
Can I use RavenDB commercially for free?

RavenDB offers a free Community License that permits commercial deployment with unlimited databases and sizes, subject to a 60-core maximum per customer and requirement to run the latest major version.

Source
What commercial licensing options does RavenDB offer?

RavenDB offers Professional, Enterprise, and AI tiers for commercial use. Pricing for these tiers requires contacting their sales team at [email protected].

Source
Does RavenDB offer a cloud hosting option?

RavenDB Cloud provides a fully managed cloud database with maintenance, failover, and backups included. Pricing is available at cloud.ravendb.net/pricing.

Source
Is there a refund window if I purchase RavenDB?

RavenDB offers a 30-day refund window for purchased licenses.

Source

Behind it

Who makes RavenDB

Company
Hibernating Rhinos
Based in
Hadera, Israel
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for RavenDB, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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