DBMS > Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. SingleStore

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. SingleStore

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

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

MySQL wire-compliant distributed RDBMS that combines an in-memory row-oriented and a disc-based column-oriented storage with patented universal storage to handle transactional and analytical workloads in one single table type

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	5.38
Rank	#62	Overall
	#35	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

milvus.io

neo4j.com

www.singlestore.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

spotify.github.io/heroic

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

docs.singlestore.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Spotify

Neo4j, Inc.

SingleStore Inc.

Initial release

2011

2014

2019

2007

2013

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

5.20, May 2024

8.5, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

free developer edition available

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

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

SingleStoreDB Cloud: The world's fastest, modern cloud database for both operational (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads. Available instantly with multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud capabilities

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C++, Go

Java, Scala

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

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

Linux

64 bit version required

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

via Elasticsearch

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

but no triggers and foreign keys

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Cluster Management API

as HTTP Rest and CLI
HTTP API
JDBC
MongoDB API
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Bash
C
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

hash partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

stores two copies of each physical data partition on two separate nodes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

can define user-defined aggregate functions for map-reduce-style calculations

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

All updates are persistent, including those to disk-based columnstores and memory-based row stores. Transaction commits are supported via write-ahead log.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

Fine grained access control via users, groups and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

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

SingleStore offers a fully-managed , distributed, highly-scalable SQL database designed...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

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

SingleStore’s competitive advantages include: Easy and Simplified Architecture with...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

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

Driving Fast Analytics: SingleStore delivers the fastest and most scalable reporting...
» more

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

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

IEX Cloud : Improves Financial Data Distribution Speed 15x with Singlestore DB Comcast,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

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

Customers in various industries worldwide including US and International Industry...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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

F ree Tier and Enterprise Edition
» 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

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