DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. Tarantool

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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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Search engine

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	1.67
Rank	#150	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#69	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

neo4j.com

www.snowflake.com

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

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

neo4j.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

Developer

Elastic

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2007

2014

2008

Current release

8.6, January 2023

5.19, April 2024

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

C and 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

hosted

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Open binary protocol

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

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

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

Immediate Consistency

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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