DBMS > Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Clickhouse Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2016

2005

2019

2007

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

3.3.3, December 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

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.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

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

Implementation language

C++

Erlang

C++, Go

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

via views

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

View functions in JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: 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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

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

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

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

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

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

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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

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