DBMS > Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. Riak KV vs. SAP HANA vs. ScyllaDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. Riak KV vs. SAP HANA vs. ScyllaDB

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

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	4.01
Rank	#79	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	4.08
Rank	#76	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Website

milvus.io

neo4j.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.scylladb.com

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

help.sap.com/hana

docs.scylladb.com

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

SAP

ScyllaDB

Initial release

2019

2007

2009

2010

2015

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

5.20, May 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

commercial

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based 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.

Scylla Cloud: Create real-time applications that run at global scale with Scylla Cloud, the industry’s most powerful NoSQL DBaaS

Implementation language

C++, Go

Java, Scala

Erlang

C++

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

Linux
OS X

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

restricted

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

Supported programming languages

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

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Erlang

SQLScript, R

yes, Lua

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

links between data sets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

in-memory tables

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)

yes, using Riak Security

yes

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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...
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ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
» 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...
» more

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

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

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
» more

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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Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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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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ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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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

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
» more

News

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22 May 2024

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22 May 2024

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21 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, GraphRAG, GraphQL, Chatbot and more
18 May 2024

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