DBMS > ArangoDB vs. Couchbase vs. Milvus vs. Realm vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison ArangoDB vs. Couchbase vs. Milvus vs. Realm vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Native multi-model DBMS for graph, document, key/value and search. All in one engine and accessible with one query language.

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

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

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
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Search engine

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

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

Score	3.26
Rank	#88	Overall
	#15	Document stores
	#5	Graph DBMS
	#12	Key-value stores
	#10	Search engines

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

Technical documentation

docs.arangodb.com

docs.couchbase.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

realm.io/docs

docs.stardog.com

Social network pages

Developer

ArangoDB Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2012

2011

2019

2014

2010

Current release

3.11.5, November 2023

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

2.3.4, January 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial license (Enterprise) available

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

ArangoDB Cloud –The Managed Cloud Service of ArangoDB. Provides fully managed, and monitored cluster deployments of any size, with enterprise-grade security. Get started for free and continue for as little as $0,21/hour.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

automatically recognizes schema within a collection

schema-free

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, boolean, list, hash

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

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

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

APIs and other access methods

AQL
Foxx Framework
Graph API (Gremlin)
GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Java & SpringData
JSON style queries
VelocyPack/VelocyStream

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

RESTful HTTP API

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

C#
C++
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Rust

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

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

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Change Listeners

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

since version 2.0

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication with configurable replication factor

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can be done with stored procedures in JavaScript

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

configurable per collection or per write
Immediate Consistency
OneShard (highly available, fault-tolerant deployment mode with ACID semantics)

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Graph and Beyond. With more than 11,000 stargazers on GitHub, ArangoDB is the leading...
» more

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Competitive advantages

Consolidation: As a native multi-model database, can be used as a full blown document...
» more

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

Typical application scenarios

Native multi-model in ArangoDB is being used for a broad range of projects across...
» more

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

Key customers

Cisco, Barclays, Refinitive, Siemens Mentor, Kabbage, Liaison, Douglas, MakeMyTrip,...
» more

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

Market metrics

ArangoDB is the leading native multi-model database with over 11,000 stargazers on...
» more

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

Licensing and pricing models

Very permissive Apache 2 License for Community Edition & commercial licenses are...
» more

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

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