DBMS > Google Cloud Datastore vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Datastore vs. Neo4j vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

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

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	4.36
Rank	#72	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/datastore

neo4j.com

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

neo4j.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2008

2007

2014

2018

2019

Current release

5.20, May 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate 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, Scala

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, details here

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) 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

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

via event handler

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes

Graph Partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Journaling Streams

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

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

Role-based access control

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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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...
» more

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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News

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10 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, Testing, Knowledge Graph, GenAI and more
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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

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.