DBMS > Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Redis vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Redis vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

Popular in-memory data platform used as a cache, message broker, and database that can be deployed on-premises, across clouds, and hybrid environments

Redis focuses on performance so most of its design decisions prioritize high performance and very low latencies.

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Key-value store

Multiple data types and a rich set of operations, as well as configurable data expiration, eviction and persistence

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

with RedisJSON
Graph DBMS

with RedisGraph
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

with RediSearch
Time Series DBMS

with RedisTimeSeries
Vector DBMS

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

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	157.80
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

milvus.io

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

redis.com
redis.io

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.redis.com/latest/index.html
redis.io/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2019

2007

1994

2009

2019

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

5.19, April 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

7.2.4, January 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis Enterprise

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate 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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Aiven for Redis: Fully managed in-memory key-value store for all your caching and speedy lookup needs.

Implementation language

C++, Go

Java, Scala

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

with RediSearch module

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

with RediSQL module

GraphQL is used as query language

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

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Lua; Redis Functions coming in Redis 7 (slides and Github)

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

only for the SQL API

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Sharding

Automatic hash-based sharding with support for hash-tags for manual sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

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

Eventual Consistency
Causal consistency can be enabled in Active-Active databases
Strong consistency with Redis Raft
Strong eventual consistency with Active-Active

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

Access Control Lists (ACLs): redis.io/docs/management/security/acl
LDAP and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Redis Enterprise
Mutual TLS authentication: redis.io/docs/management/security/encryption
Password-based authentication

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
» more

News

Creating the GQL Database Language Standard
7 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: GraphRAG, Knowledge Graphs, Open Source AI, GraphQL and more
4 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Nodes 2024, Data Modelling, Events, Knowledge Graphs and more
27 April 2024

GQL is Here: Your Cypher Queries in a GQL World
26 April 2024

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

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