DBMS > GraphDB vs. Neo4j vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison GraphDB vs. Neo4j vs. Virtuoso

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

Open source graph database

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.24
Rank	#108	Overall
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	51.04
Rank	#20	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.18
Rank	#89	Overall
	#15	Document stores
	#5	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#48	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.ontotext.com

neo4j.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

neo4j.com/docs

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Ontotext

Neo4j, Inc.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2000

2007

1998

Current release

9.6, February 2021

4.2.4 , March 2021

08.03.3316, March 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

Named S4, Ontotext provides a semantic graph database based on GraphDB in the cloud.

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

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

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

GraphDB Enterprise is a high-performance semantic repository created by Ontotext....
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Neo4j is a native graph database platform that is built to store, query, analyze...
» more

Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
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Neo4j database is the only transactional database that combines everything you need...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked open data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

BBC, Press Association, Financial Times, DK, Euromoney, The British Museum, Getty...
» more

Over 300 commercial customers and over 750 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than a 15 million...
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB-Free is free to use. SE and Enterprise are licensed per CPU-Core used. Perpetual...
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GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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