DBMS > CrateDB vs. Neo4j vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison CrateDB vs. Neo4j vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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 embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.73
Rank	#229	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	116.01
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.87
Rank	#74	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cratedb.com/docs

neo4j.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Crate

Neo4j, Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

2013

2007

2000

2017

Current release

5.19, April 2024

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

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.

Implementation language

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

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

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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 Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions (Javascript)

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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...
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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...
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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

GQL is Here: Your Cypher Queries in a GQL World
26 April 2024

GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived
25 April 2024

What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
24 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

Announcing NODES 2024: Submit Your Talk
17 April 2024

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