DBMS > ClickHouse vs. GraphDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. GraphDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j vs. RethinkDB

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.

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

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

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.66
Rank	#107	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Website

clickhouse.com

www.ontotext.com

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

neo4j.com

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

docs.heavy.ai

neo4j.com/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

Social network pages

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Ontotext

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2016

2000

2016

2007

2009

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

10.4, October 2023

5.10, January 2022

5.20, May 2024

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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++

Java

C++ and CUDA

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

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

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

none

Sharding

Round robin

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

range based

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

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Immediate Consistency

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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 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.

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

yes

users and table-level permissions

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

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

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

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

Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

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

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

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

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

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

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31 May 2024

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Understanding the Graph Center of Excellence
17 May 2024

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15 June 2024

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10 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, Testing, Knowledge Graph, GenAI and more
8 June 2024

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

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