DBMS > ClickHouse vs. CockroachDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. CockroachDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j vs. QuestDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	16.20
Rank	#37	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	6.10
Rank	#58	Overall
	#33	Relational DBMS

Score	2.10
Rank	#126	Overall
	#61	Relational DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.48
Rank	#115	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.cockroachlabs.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

neo4j.com

questdb.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

docs.heavy.ai

neo4j.com/docs

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Cockroach Labs

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2016

2015

2016

2007

2014

Current release

v24.3.2.23-lts, April 2024

23.1.1, May 2023

5.10, January 2022

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
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.

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

Implementation language

C++

C++ and CUDA

Java, Scala

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux

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

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic schema

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Supported programming languages

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++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

Sharding

Round robin

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Multi-source replication using RAFT

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

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.

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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...
» more

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

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

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

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

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

News

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

Announcing NODES 2024: Submit Your Talk
17 April 2024

ISO GQL: A Defining Moment in the History of Database Innovation
17 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, RAG, Neo4j Guide, ERP and more
13 April 2024

Neo4j Brings GraphRAG Capabilities for GenAI to Google Cloud
9 April 2024

Does "vpmovzxbd" Scare You? Here's Why it Doesn't Have To
12 April 2024

Create an ADS-B flight radar with QuestDB and a Raspberry Pi
8 April 2024

Build a temperature IoT sensor with Raspberry Pi Pico & QuestDB
5 April 2024

Create an IoT server with QuestDB and a Raspberry Pi
4 April 2024

TimescaleDB vs. QuestDB: Performance benchmarks and overview
27 March 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.