DBMS > FileMaker vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. PouchDB vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. PouchDB vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

neo4j.com

pouchdb.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

neo4j.com/docs

pouchdb.com/guides

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1983

2012

2007

2012

2000

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

5.19, April 2024

7.1.1, June 2019

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Public Domain

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, Scala

JavaScript

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

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

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

PHP

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

JavaScript

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

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