DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon Neptune vs. Couchbase vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon Neptune vs. Couchbase vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

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

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

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

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	2.29
Rank	#113	Overall
	#9	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/neptune

www.couchbase.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

docs.couchbase.com

docs.heavy.ai

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2012

2017

2011

2016

2007

Current release

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

5.10, January 2022

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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++ and CUDA

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

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

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Round robin

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-availability zones high availability, asynchronous replication for up to 15 read replicas within a single region. Global database clusters consists of a primary write DB cluster in one region, and up to five secondary read DB clusters in different regions. Each secondary region can have up to 16 reader instances.

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

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

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with encyption-at-rest

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

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

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