DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. GraphDB vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. GraphDB vs. Neo4j

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	157.69
Rank	#8	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.70
Rank	#111	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	60.14
Rank	#19	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.ontotext.com

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

neo4j.com/docs

Social network pages

Developer

Elastic

Ontotext

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

2007

Current release

7.8.0, June 2020

9.8, June 2021

4.4.7, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses 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.

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 OS with a Java VM

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free and schema-optional

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

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

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

GraphDB Enterprise is a high-performance semantic repository created by Ontotext....
» more

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

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

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

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked open data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

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

Key customers

BBC, Press Association, Financial Times, DK, Euromoney, The British Museum, Getty...
» more

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

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

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

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB-Free is free to use. SE and Enterprise are licensed per CPU-Core used. Perpetual...
» more

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

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