DBMS > Ignite vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Ignite vs. Neo4j vs. RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Apache Ignite is a memory-centric distributed database, caching, and processing platform for transactional, analytical, and streaming workloads, delivering in-memory speeds at petabyte scale.

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

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	3.11
Rank	#96	Overall
	#15	Key-value stores
	#49	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

apacheignite.readme.io/docs

neo4j.com/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Neo4j, Inc.

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2015

2007

2004

2014

2018

Current release

Apache Ignite 2.6

5.20, May 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

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

C++, Java, .Net

Java, Scala

Java

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Java
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

via event handler

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes (replicated cache)

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

yes

Journaling Streams

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

in-memory journaling

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Security Hooks for custom implementations

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Role-based access control

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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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

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

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, Testing, Knowledge Graph, GenAI and more
8 June 2024

Neo4j and Snowflake Bring Graph Data Science Into the AI Data Cloud
4 June 2024

RDF vs. Property Graphs: Choosing the Right Approach for Implementing a Knowledge Graph
4 June 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

openCypher Will Pave the Road to GQL for Cypher Implementers
22 May 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.