DBMS > ClickHouse vs. HarperDB vs. Neo4j vs. PlanetScale vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. HarperDB vs. Neo4j vs. PlanetScale vs. RDF4J

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.

Ultra-low latency distributed database with an intuitive REST API supporting NoSQL and SQL (including joins). Deployment of functions and databases simultaneously with a consolidated node-level architecture.

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

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	0.60
Rank	#244	Overall
	#38	Document stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.49
Rank	#155	Overall
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.harperdb.io/docs

neo4j.com/docs

planetscale.com/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

HarperDB

Neo4j, Inc.

PlanetScale

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Initial release

2016

2017

2007

2020

2004

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

3.1, August 2021

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free community edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

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.

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

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

Implementation language

C++

Node.js

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X

Linux

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

Docker
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic schema

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

RDF Schemas

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON data 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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like data manipulation statements

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC
ODBC
React Hooks
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
WebSocket

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

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
C#
C++
ColdFusion
D
Dart
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
MatLab
Objective C
Perl
PHP
PowerShell
Prolog
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Custom Functions

since release 3.1

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

A table resides as a whole on one (or more) nodes in a cluster

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

the nodes on which a table resides can be defined

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic execution of specific operations

ACID

ACID at shard level

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using LMDB

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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.

Access rights for users and roles

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

News

This Week in Neo4j: Llamaindex, Semantic Search, Graph Database, Entity Resolution and more
15 June 2024

Neo4j-Databricks Connector Delivers Deeper Insights, Faster GenAI Development
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

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.