DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Milvus 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

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	138.60
Rank	#8	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	0.78
Rank	#240	Overall
	#17	Search engines

Score	55.43
Rank	#20	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

milvus.io

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2010

2019

2007

Current release

7.8.0, June 2020

2.2, November 2022

5.3, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++, Go

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

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

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free and schema-optional

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

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

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Video media : video understanding, video deduplication. E-commerce and mobile applications...
» more

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by over 1,000 enterprises, including Baidu, eBay, IKEA, LINE, Shopee,...
» more

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

Market metrics

As of Oct 2022, 14k+ GitHub stars 2M+ downloads and installations 1000+ enterprise...
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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News

Announcing Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.3
1 February 2023

This Week in Neo4j: VS Code Extension, Geospatial Data, Closeness Centrality, Project Management, and More!
28 January 2023

How to Graph an ERP System in 3 Easy Steps
26 January 2023

Graph Analytics: The Future in Data Science?
25 January 2023

This Week in Neo4j: OpenAI, Deploying on GCP, Neodash, Graph Algorithms, Python, and More
21 January 2023

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