DBMS > Couchbase vs. Neo4j vs. Trafodion vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Neo4j vs. Trafodion vs. YugabyteDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Apache Trafodion has been retired in 2021. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

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

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

Transactional SQL-on-Hadoop DBMS

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Document store

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

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
Wide column store

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.63
Rank	#109	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

neo4j.com/docs

trafodion.apache.org/documentation.html

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation, originally developed by HP

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2011

2007

2014

2017

Current release

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

5.20, May 2024

2.3.0, February 2019

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java, Scala

C++, Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

Linux

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

depending on used data model

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

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

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/ADO.Net

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Java Stored Procedures

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes, via HBase

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via user defined functions and HBase

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

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

Immediate Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

based on RocksDB

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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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

2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

Apache 2.0 license for the database
» more

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