DBMS > AllegroGraph vs. Couchbase vs. DuckDB vs. Neo4j vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison AllegroGraph vs. Couchbase vs. DuckDB vs. Neo4j vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

High performance, persistent RDF store with additional support for Graph DBMS

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store

with version 6.5
Graph DBMS
RDF store
Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	1.06
Rank	#187	Overall
	#30	Document stores
	#17	Graph DBMS
	#7	RDF stores
	#7	Vector DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

franz.com/agraph/support/documentation/current/agraph-introduction.html

docs.couchbase.com

duckdb.org/docs

neo4j.com/docs

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Franz Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2004

2011

2018

2007

2014

Current release

8.0, December 2023

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

0.10, February 2024

5.19, April 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Limited community edition free

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Java, Scala

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF schemas

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

bulk load of XML files possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SPARQL is used as query language

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Clojure
Java
Lisp
Perl
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript or Common Lisp

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

with Federation

Automatic Sharding

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Knowledge Graph Platform Leader FedShard - Designed for Entity-Event Knowledge Graph...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

AllegroGraph is uniquely suited to support adhoc queries through SPARQL, Prolog and...
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

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