DBMS > Neo4j vs. OpenSearch vs. Virtuoso vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. OpenSearch vs. Virtuoso vs. YugabyteDB

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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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Score	2.63
Rank	#109	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Website

neo4j.com

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

opensearch.org/docs/latest

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Amazon Web Services

OpenLink Software

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2007

2021

1998

2017

Current release

5.20, May 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.
STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

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

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

depending on used data model

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Virtuoso PL

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

yes

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

based on RocksDB

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)

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

yes

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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OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
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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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The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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Apache 2.0 license for the database
» more

News

This Week in Neo4j: Llamaindex, Semantic Search, Graph Database, Entity Resolution and more
15 June 2024

Neo4j-Databricks Connector Delivers Deeper Insights, Faster GenAI Development
10 June 2024

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