Works great with Apache CouchDB, PouchDB, Cloudant, etc. The mobile libraries and Sync Gateway all use the CouchDB sync protocol. We built Sync Gateway because

Works great with Apache CouchDB, PouchDB, Cloudant, etc. The mobile libraries and Sync Gateway all use the CouchDB sync protocol. We built Sync Gateway because the Apache CouchDB access control model wasn't fine grained enough for most apps, so it adds a data routing function to control sync access. (See link downthread). Thanks for the feedback about simplicity. Our next release makes the Sync Gateway default config a lot more beginner friendly and even today we ship with a dev mode that uses a tiny embedded database instead of a Couchbase Server cluster for storage.