DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Neo4j vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Neo4j vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#387	Overall
	#61	Key-value stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

neo4j.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

firebase.google.com/docs/database

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2017

2012

2014

2007

2018

Current release

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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, Scala

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

JavaScript

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

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

yes

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

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

User concepts

Access control

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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

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