DBMS > Citus vs. Elasticsearch vs. Greenplum vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Elasticsearch vs. Greenplum vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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

Analytic Database platform built on PostgreSQL. Full name is Pivotal Greenplum Database

A logical database in Greenplum is an array of individual PostgreSQL databases working together to present a single database image.

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	8.37
Rank	#48	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

greenplum.org

neo4j.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

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

docs.greenplum.org

neo4j.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Pivotal Software Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2005

2007

2014

Current release

8.1, December 2018

8.6, January 2023

7.0.0, September 2023

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

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

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

since Version 4.2

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate 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

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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