DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Neo4j vs. Realm vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Neo4j vs. Realm vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

neo4j.com

realm.io

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

neo4j.com/docs

realm.io/docs

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Amazon

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Neo4j, Inc.

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2012

2010

2007

2014

2010

Current release

5.19, April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

Erlang

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via event handler

yes

Change Listeners

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

yes

Access rights for 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

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...
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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...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.