DBMS > Neo4j vs. ObjectBox vs. SQLite vs. Stardog vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. ObjectBox vs. SQLite vs. Stardog vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.22
Rank	#172	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Score	116.01
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	2.05
Rank	#129	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	1.89
Rank	#138	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

docs.objectbox.io

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.stardog.com

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

ObjectBox Limited

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Stardog-Union

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2007

2017

2000

2010

2019

Current release

5.19, April 2024

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

Public Domain

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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.

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

Implementation language

Java, Scala

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux

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

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

server-less

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

dynamic column types

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary native API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

online/offline synchronization between client and server

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

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

yes

Access rights for users and roles

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

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

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
» more

Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

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

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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

What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
24 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

Edge AI: The era of on-device AI
23 April 2024

In-Memory Database Use Cases
15 February 2024

Data Viewer for Objects – announcing ObjectBox Admin
14 November 2023

Vector Databases for Edge AI
9 August 2023

Vector Database Release for Flutter / Dart + Python
13 June 2023

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