DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

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)

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

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

Primary database model

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

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

neo4j.com

rocksdb.org

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

neo4j.com/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

sphinxsearch.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

Facebook, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2017

2007

2013

2001

2019

Current release

5.19, April 2024

8.11.4, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

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 (SphinxQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
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

C++ API
Java API

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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

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.
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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...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.