DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j vs. Riak KV vs. SAP HANA vs. ScyllaDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j vs. Riak KV vs. SAP HANA vs. ScyllaDB

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

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

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

Primary database model

Search engine

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	4.01
Rank	#79	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	4.08
Rank	#76	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.scylladb.com

Technical documentation

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

neo4j.com/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

help.sap.com/hana

docs.scylladb.com

Developer

Elastic

Neo4j, Inc.

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

SAP

ScyllaDB

Initial release

2010

2007

2009

2010

2015

Current release

8.6, January 2023

5.20, May 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

commercial

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based 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.

Scylla Cloud: Create real-time applications that run at global scale with Scylla Cloud, the industry’s most powerful NoSQL DBaaS

Implementation language

Java

Java, Scala

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

Linux
OS X

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

restricted

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

Supported programming languages

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

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Erlang

SQLScript, R

yes, Lua

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

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

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

links between data sets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

yes

in-memory tables

User concepts

Access control

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

yes, using Riak Security

yes

Access rights for users can be defined per object

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
» more

Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
» more

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