DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. HugeGraph vs. Neo4j vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. HugeGraph vs. Neo4j vs. Tarantool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

A fast-speed and highly-scalable Graph DBMS

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

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#335	Overall
	#31	Graph DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.67
Rank	#143	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#65	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.citusdata.com

github.com/hugegraph
hugegraph.apache.org

neo4j.com

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.citusdata.com

hugegraph.apache.org/docs

neo4j.com/docs

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

Developer

Amazon

Baidu

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2012

2010

2018

2007

2008

Current release

8.1, December 2018

0.9

5.20, May 2024

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

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

Java

Java, Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Linux
macOS
Unix

Linux

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

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

also supports composite index and range index

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
TinkerPop Gremlin

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Open binary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Groovy
Java
Python

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

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

asynchronous Gremlin script jobs

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via event handler

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

depending on used storage backend, e.g. Cassandra and HBase

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

depending on used storage backend, e.g. Cassandra and HBase

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

via hugegraph-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

edges in graph

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

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

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users, roles and permissions

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

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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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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