DBMS > CouchDB vs. CrateDB vs. Neo4j vs. PostgreSQL vs. PouchDB
System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. CrateDB vs. Neo4j vs. PostgreSQL vs. PouchDB
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| Name | CouchDB  stands for "Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware" Xexclude from comparison | CrateDB Xexclude from comparison | Neo4j Xexclude from comparison | PostgreSQL Xexclude from comparison | PouchDB Xexclude from comparison | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Description | A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones. | Distributed Database based on Lucene | Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings | Widely used open source RDBMS Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL | JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Primary database model | Document store | Document store Spatial DBMS Search engine Time Series DBMS Vector DBMS | Graph DBMS | Relational DBMS with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module. | Document store | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Secondary database models | Spatial DBMS using the Geocouch extension | Relational DBMS | Document store Graph DBMS with Apache AgeSpatial DBMS Vector DBMS with pgvector extension | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Website | couchdb.apache.org | cratedb.com | neo4j.com | www.postgresql.org | pouchdb.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Technical documentation | docs.couchdb.org/en/stable | cratedb.com/docs | neo4j.com/docs | www.postgresql.org/docs | pouchdb.com/guides | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Developer | Apache Software Foundation Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer | Crate | Neo4j, Inc. | PostgreSQL Global Development Group www.postgresql.org/developer | Apache Software Foundation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Initial release | 2005 | 2013 | 2007 | 1989 1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL | 2012 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Current release | 3.3.3, December 2023 | 5.19, April 2024 | 16.2, February 2024 | 7.1.1, June 2019 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| License Commercial or Open Source | Open Source Apache version 2 | Open Source | Open Source GPL version3, commercial licenses available | Open Source BSD | Open Source | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cloud-based only Only available as a cloud service | no | no | no | no | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DBaaS offerings (sponsored links) Database as a Service Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed. | CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform. | Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers. | Aiven for PostgreSQL: Fully managed PostgreSQL for developers with 70+ extensions and flexible orchestration tools. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Implementation language | Erlang | Java | Java, Scala | C | JavaScript | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Server operating systems | Android BSD Linux OS X Solaris Windows | All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support | Linux Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database. OS X Solaris Windows | FreeBSD HP-UX Linux NetBSD OpenBSD OS X Solaris Unix Windows | server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Data scheme | schema-free | Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free) | schema-free and schema-optional | yes | schema-free | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Typing predefined data types such as float or date | no | yes | yes | yes | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 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. | no | no | yes specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality. | no | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Secondary indexes | yes via views | yes | yes pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene | yes | yes via views | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SQL Support of SQL | no | yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility | no | yes standard with numerous extensions | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| APIs and other access methods | RESTful HTTP/JSON API | ADO.NET JDBC ODBC PostgreSQL wire protocol Prometheus Remote Read/Write RESTful HTTP API | Bolt protocol Cypher query language Java API Neo4j-OGM Object Graph MapperRESTful HTTP API Spring Data Neo4j TinkerPop 3 | ADO.NET JDBC native C library ODBC streaming API for large objects | HTTP REST only for PouchDB Server JavaScript API | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Supported programming languages | C C# ColdFusion Erlang Haskell Java JavaScript Lisp Lua Objective-C OCaml Perl PHP PL/SQL Python Ruby Smalltalk | .NET Erlang Go community maintained clientJava JavaScript (Node.js) community maintained clientPerl community maintained clientPHP Python R Ruby community maintained clientScala community maintained client | .Net Clojure Elixir Go Groovy Haskell Java JavaScript Perl PHP Python Ruby Scala | .Net C C++ Delphi Java JDBCJavaScript (Node.js) Perl PHP Python Tcl | JavaScript | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Server-side scripts Stored procedures | View functions in JavaScript | user defined functions (Javascript) | yes User defined Procedures and Functions | user defined functions realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc. | View functions in JavaScript | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Triggers | yes | no | yes via event handler | yes | yes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Partitioning methods Methods for storing different data on different nodes | Sharding improved architecture with release 2.0 | Sharding | yes using Neo4j Fabric | partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash | Sharding with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Replication methods Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes | Multi-source replication Source-replica replication | Configurable replication on table/partition-level | Causal Clustering using Raft protocol available in in Enterprise Version only | Source-replica replication other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions | Multi-source replication also with CouchDB databases Source-replica replication also with CouchDB databases | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| MapReduce Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods | yes | no | no | no | yes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Consistency concepts Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system | Eventual Consistency | Eventual Consistency Read-after-write consistency on record level | Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode | Immediate Consistency | Eventual Consistency | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Foreign keys Referential integrity | no | no | yes Relationships in graphs | yes | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Transaction concepts Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data | no atomic operations within a single document possible | no unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy | ACID | ACID | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Concurrency Support for concurrent manipulation of data | yes strategy: optimistic locking | yes | yes | yes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Durability Support for making data persistent | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In-memory capabilities Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only. | no | no | no | yes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| User concepts Access control | Access rights for users can be defined per database | rights management via user accounts | Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos) | fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More information provided by the system vendor | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CouchDB stands for "Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware" | CrateDB | Neo4j | PostgreSQL | PouchDB | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Specific characteristics | The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native... » more | Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale... » more | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Competitive advantages | Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling... » more | Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely... » more | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Typical application scenarios | IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics... » more | Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network... » more | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Key customers | Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most... » more | Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers... » more | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Market metrics | The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®... » more | Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million... » more | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Licensing and pricing models | See CrateDB pricing > » more | GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial... » more | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| News | This Week in Neo4j: Nodes 2024, Data Modelling, Events, Knowledge Graphs and more GQL is Here: Your Cypher Queries in a GQL World GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)? This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| More resources | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CouchDB stands for "Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware" | CrateDB | Neo4j | PostgreSQL | PouchDB | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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