DBMS > Graph Engine vs. Neo4j vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Graph Engine vs. Neo4j vs. RethinkDB

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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

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

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Graph DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.58
Rank	#239	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#34	Key-value stores

Score	47.91
Rank	#20	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.30
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

www.graphengine.io

neo4j.com

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

neo4j.com/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2010

2007

2009

Current release

5.23, August 2024

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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.

Implementation language

.NET and C

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

.NET

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

users and table-level permissions

More information provided by the system vendor

News

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12 May 2025

This Week in Neo4j: NODES, Knowledge Graph, Graph Analytics, MCP and more
10 May 2025

Aura Graph Analytics: A Technical Deep Dive
7 May 2025

Introducing Neo4j Aura Graph Analytics: Scalable, Easy-to-Deploy Graph Analytics for Any Data Source
7 May 2025

Agentic GraphRAG for Commercial Contracts
5 May 2025

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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12 June 2019, Amy Hodler & Mark Needham, Neo4j (guest author)

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2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

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22 December 2015, Emil Eifrem (guest author)

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Recent citations in the news

Trinity
30 October 2010, Microsoft

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27 February 2019, Data Science Central

IBM releases Graph, a service that can outperform SQL databases
27 July 2016, GeekWire

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3 March 2014, Redmondmag.com

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6 June 2012, Ars Technica

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7 May 2025, PR Newswire

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5 October 2016, VentureBeat

RethinkDB is dead, and MongoDB isn’t what killed it
24 January 2017, TechRepublic

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