DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. Newts vs. OpenSearch vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. Newts vs. OpenSearch vs. PouchDB

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.

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

Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.07
Rank	#375	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

neo4j.com

opennms.github.io/newts

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

neo4j.com/docs

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

opensearch.org/docs/latest

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Neo4j, Inc.

OpenNMS Group

Amazon Web Services

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2007

2014

2021

2012

Current release

5.20, May 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

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.

STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.
Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Java

JavaScript

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

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

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

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

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

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
Java API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

Java

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via event handler

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

yes

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

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

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Key customers

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

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...
» more

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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