"Running a server for a database is not a small task, it takes time away from development"
Setting up a small server does take time away from development, but it's far from being complicated. An used Raspberry Pi does the trick (and to be honest any team should have at least one server available, be it to share heavy files that platforms like GitHub aren't meant to handle or other things like that). It takes half a day if you don't know anything about CouchDB and ultimately the gain is worth the hassle. Any other similar tools I know of need a server to function properly (Articy:Draft for instance requires an SVN server), though it's sometimes set-up automatically as a background thing.