DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. JanusGraph vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Neo4j vs. TigerGraph

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. JanusGraph vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Neo4j vs. TigerGraph

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters

It was forked from the latest code base of Titan in January 2017

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

A complete, distributed, parallel graph computing platform supporting web-scale data analytics in real-time

Primary database model

Document store

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	1.94
Rank	#129	Overall
	#12	Graph DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.83
Rank	#139	Overall
	#13	Graph DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

janusgraph.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

neo4j.com

www.tigergraph.com

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.janusgraph.org

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

neo4j.com/docs

docs.tigergraph.com

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Linux Foundation; originally developed as Titan by Aurelius

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2010

2017

2014

2007

2017

Current release

0.6.3, February 2023

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

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

Erlang

Java

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

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

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (GSQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

GSQL (TigerGraph Query Language)
Kafka
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Clojure
Java
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

JavaScript

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

depending on the used storage backend (e.g. Cassandra, HBase, BerkeleyDB)

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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

Role-based access control

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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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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