DBMS > BaseX vs. Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison BaseX vs. Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

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

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

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

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.73
Rank	#142	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

basex.org

www.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

docs.basex.org

docs.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

BaseX GmbH

Couchbase, Inc.

Elastic

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2007

2011

2010

2007

Current release

10.7, August 2023

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

8.6, January 2023

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

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

Open Source

Elastic License

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.

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

Implementation language

Java

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free and schema-optional

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

XQuery supports 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 search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

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

Java 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

Supported programming languages

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

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

multiple readers, single writer

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

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

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

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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