Two main revolutions in data management have occurred recently, namely Big Data analytics and NoSQL databases. Even though they have evolved with different purposes, their independent developments complement each other and their convergence would benefit businesses tremendously in making real-time decisions using volumes of complex data sets that could be both structured and unstructured. While on one hand many software solutions have emerged in supporting Big Data analytics, on the other, many NoSQL database packages have arrived in the market. However, they lack an independent benchmarking and comparative evaluation. The aim of this paper is to provide an understanding of their contexts and an in-depth study to compare the features of four main NoSQL data models that have evolved. The performance comparison of traditional SQL with NoSQL databases for Big Data analytics shows that NoSQL database poses to be a better option for business situations that require simplicity, adaptability, high performance analytics and distributed scalability of large data. This paper concludes that the NoSQL movement should be leveraged for Big Data analytics and would coexist with relational (SQL) databases.