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Both, Hyperledger Fabric and BichainDB offer the possibility to have a private, permissioned blockchain database. With their concepts they try to address the main disadvantages of public blockchains like lack of privacy and lack of performance (low throughput etc).

What are the main differences between the two technologies?

FrankZp
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1 Answers1

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If you try out example application of both frameworks, you will quickly notice that BigchainDB is easier to start with. Hyperledger Fabric involves a lot of more knowledge to master it.

  1. Fabric knows different kinds of nodes (peers, peers additionally being endorser nodes, orderer) and thereby allows a very flexible setup, depending on the consortium design and organisations themselves. BigchainDB has one kind of node that can be deployed. Also every involved organisation gets one node of course.
  2. Fabric has richer capabilities to model assets and all kinds of transactions. One transaction kind can always be implemented by a custom processor function doing whatever is needed to query or modify the state of the ledger. BigchainDB only knows CREATE and TRANSFER transactions on every defined asset. You can create something (that may be also divisable, e.g. amounts of tokens) and can transfer them completely or partly.
  3. Both seem to have pretty low level APIs. Fabric has more APIs and config models that need to be mastered. But Fabric is being complemented by frameworks such as Composer (with all its nice libraries involved, like playground and rest-server) that really improve the programming model. As far as I know there is nothing like that for BigchainDB, also because it is pretty simple from the start.
  4. Consensus: BigchainDB uses Tendermint which is Byzantine Fault Tolerant. Fabric does PBFT which is Practically Byzantine Fault Tolerance, based on the idea of Miguel Castro.

In general I would say that Fabric is intended to be used for complex business use cases. BigchainDB is simpler and nice for assets that can be divided (financal stuff like coins/tokens maybe).

jpietzsch
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