DBMS > Graph Engine vs. Lovefield vs. Neo4j vs. Stardog vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison Graph Engine vs. Lovefield vs. Neo4j vs. Stardog vs. Tarantool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

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

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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

Score	0.62
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	0.32
Rank	#290	Overall
	#132	Relational DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.05
Rank	#129	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	1.67
Rank	#150	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#69	Relational DBMS

Website

www.graphengine.io

google.github.io/lovefield

neo4j.com

www.stardog.com

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

neo4j.com/docs

docs.stardog.com

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

Developer

Microsoft

Google

Neo4j, Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2010

2014

2007

2010

2008

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

5.19, April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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

.NET and C

JavaScript

Java, Scala

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

.NET

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

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Linux

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

Linux
macOS
Windows

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Open binary protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

JavaScript

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

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

Using read-only observers

yes

via event handler

yes

via event handlers

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users and roles

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

News

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26 April 2024

GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived
25 April 2024

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24 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

Announcing NODES 2024: Submit Your Talk
17 April 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

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DB-Engines blog posts

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22 December 2015, Emil Eifrem (guest author)

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9 November 2021, Vladimir Perepelytsya, Tarantool (sponsor)

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