DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. GigaSpaces vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. GigaSpaces vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

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

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

neo4j.com/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Gigaspaces Technologies

Neo4j, Inc.

Facebook, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

2007

2013

2014

Current release

15.5, September 2020

5.20, May 2024

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

commercial

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, C++, .Net

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

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

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

C++ API
Java API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes, event driven architecture

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

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

Immediate 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

yes

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Role-based 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

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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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

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

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

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

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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News

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8 June 2024

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

openCypher Will Pave the Road to GQL for Cypher Implementers
22 May 2024

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